


The Woman In Blue

by Ferritin4



Series: The Woman in Blue [2]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Fantasy, M/M, Priests, Religion, Romance, Werewolves, fairytales - Freeform, gothic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-11-30
Packaged: 2018-04-28 04:23:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 54,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5077672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ferritin4/pseuds/Ferritin4
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nicklas had been going to visit demons ever since he had taken his vows at nineteen, two weeks after his mother had opened her eyes one cold winter morning and seen the face of God. She had been dreaming of Him for months, and then, finally, like the sun rising, she had woken to meet the Lord Himself. Nicklas had woken an hour later to find his mother standing outside, her hands raised to the sky and the trees around her bowed down like courtiers in the presence of a king.</p><p>It had been a formative experience.</p><p>Nicklas could not make the oaks kneel, but he could talk to God as well as the next man, and if he brought up the right topics, God had a way of listening.</p><p>Sasha had been going to visit demons ever since Nicklas had found him with claws and in chains so long ago, and if God did not listen to him, it was not for lack of encouragement to the Lord on Nicklas’s part.</p><p>--</p><p>A fairytale of romance, monsters, and worship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to special_boots for editing this, and to my few patient alpha readers who were full of excitement and kept this thing going.
> 
>   
>  [](https://40.media.tumblr.com/b708e75083abf37bf48f02e5eb6a4aad/tumblr_nwwyxlIlED1t48qkbo1_1280.jpg)   
>    
>  gorgeous cover art by **[goddamnithockey/reallyyeahokay](http://goddamnithockey.tumblr.com/image/132068686049)**! click her name for full-size version.   
> 

“It’s just like big dog,” Sasha said. He picked up his steak knife and started scraping the warm candle wax off the table, apparently for lack of more diverting entertainments.

Lord, thought Nicklas, give me strength, and the Lord gave him a little bit.

Mr. Latta raised his eyebrows, his hands still clutching his armrests. “Like a dog,” he said. “Like a big dog.”

“It’s just like a big dog,” Nicklas cut in, “except for it’s violent and terrifying, and people try to shoot it and ward it off with crosses. It’s a werewolf, and it is a lovely thing to have on hand when you are fighting the forces of evil,” he shot Sasha a quelling glance, “less ideal at dinner parties and, in this instance, at parliamentary meetings.”

“So you’re telling me that we have to go and say to the Queen, no, you’re not available to attend the re-sanctification of the church of Gillin under a holy relic of Saint Casper that _you_ preserved because one of you is a _big dog_ ,” Mr. Latta said.

Sasha smiled at the table, blatantly pleased, eyes dancing for a moment.

Nicklas bit his own lip somewhat fruitlessly.

“We are happy to attend at a more convenient time,” Nicklas said, regaining his manners. “But at this juncture I believe the Queen, in all her glory and grace, might find our company a little distasteful.”

“Honestly,” Mr. Wilson said, “I’m afraid the Queen is probably going to find half your company pretty distasteful either way, but we can always tell her he’s sick or something.”

Sasha slanted him a glare. Mr. Wilson blanched slightly.

“Pride is a sin,” Nicklas said, taking the knife away. “Say he is sick, if that is what suits you. Or,” he flicked an annoyed look at Sasha, “you can say I'm sick.”

“Wolf is a sin,” Sasha said, not looking at the gentlemen any longer, “but wolf don't get _sick_.”

“Technically, the wolf is an abomination,” Nicklas told him, as if they had not had this conversation over a hundred times.

“Goes to Hell one way or other,” Sasha said pleasantly.

“Yes it does, but if I go to Hell, that’s my fault,” Nicklas said, thus wrapping up the debate.

“Father, really,” Mr. Latta said, sounding slightly appalled.

“Please don't worry, I am good in His grace,” Nicklas said. “And bless you both, my sons, but I think you must be going.”

He did not have to think about it all that hard.

The gentlemen, he thought, were no more petrified than when they had entered the small church, and they were going to be on their way before they knew the sort or magnitude of danger they were in. That being said, they should have left ten minutes ago.

There would be no harm done, but it was well past time for anyone to be near Sasha.

“Ah, of course,” Mr. Wilson said, practically jumping out of his seat. Sasha was watching his own hand, flexing the muscles in his fingers as gently as he could against the wood of the table.

“Good evening to you both,” Nicklas said, shooing them out.

Sasha had not moved at all when Nicklas shut the doors and latched them, nor when he found his way back to the table beside the fireplace.

“Are you all right?” Nicklas asked. “Are you going to stay up here?”

“I think no,” Sasha said suddenly, standing up. Nicklas sighed.

Downstairs was a place of their own construction, safer than houses even for monsters like Sasha. They had laid down the floor themselves, when Sasha’s hands were only human.

Nicklas had seen Sasha locked up; once, seven years ago, he had seen Sasha chained and beaten, and he did not ever want to see it again. The cellar was a comfort, someplace Sasha could curl up and lay down and wait until he was fit for guests.

Up here was only an old, unremarkable church that neither of them had helped build, and it was just as safe, if getting grumpier by the second.

“I think maybe you are lazy,” Nicklas said. “I think _maybe_ you’re being childish.”

“Going to kill Queen, why not start now,” Sasha sulked. His hand was still planted on the table. Nicklas snorted.

“I have my doubts about the Queen’s standing in God’s eyes,” he said, smiling. “I think I’m going to be fine here.”

“You think what you want,” Sasha snarled, low and guttural, not at all human, and now it was too late for the cellar, too late for the lock and the key, too late for iron bars and rough flagstones.

“Yes I do,” Nicklas said.

The candlelight was bright, but not so bright as Sasha’s eyes. The knife on Nicklas’s belt was sharp, but not so sharp as his claws, curving in silver arcs from his fingertips in the moonlight.

He always wanted to touch Sasha when he was like this, though he never did. Sasha looked on edge, his hackles raised; he looked like he needed soothing. The wolf was an abomination, and so Sasha was too from the day he was born, but it was a part of him. It bothered some sympathetic kernel within Nicklas to see him hate it, if only from time to time.

He was born to it, and he had no reason to think ill of his own nature, though God might disagree.

Some less-humble part of Nicklas just wanted to prove Sasha wrong. He wanted to pat Sasha on the head as a joke, because it did not matter what Sasha, or the Queen's gentlemen, or anyone thought: Nicklas was in no danger.

Sasha let his claws dig into the wood and then flexed them back. In and out, gouge and release.

“I’m going to read, if that’s all right,” Nicklas said, settling himself by the fire.

“Read Swedish,” Sasha growled. “Don’t want to know what you saying.”

“You know what I’m saying,” Nicklas retorted, because Sasha knew most of the verses in Russian, English, _and_ Swedish at this point.

Dig and flex; fight and retreat. “Hmph,” Sasha said, heavier than any human voice, like the wary noise a dog makes at the unexpected knock. He stood.

“Hmph.” Nicklas smiled, just to make Sasha lose his scowl for a moment, and to make him give in and sit back down.

It was well past time for anyone to be near Sasha, beyond Nicklas and God.


	2. The Woman in Blue

The woman in blue came to the church two days later, with a child in her arms.

She was wrapped up almost as well as the infant, swathed in threadbare, mud-splashed blue cotton, and Nicklas could not help but think that she looked like the Madonna.

He had been working outside when she came, and he had not heard the doors, nor the tread of her feet.

“Nicky!” Sasha had yelled. Nicklas had come out of the library with a smile on his face and then promptly lost it.

She looked like the Madonna if she was wasting away: she was so thin as to be almost brittle, and she was tired enough that it appeared she might keel over at any minute.

“Sasha,” Nicklas said, watching her sway, and Sasha reached out and caught her before she collapsed.

“Here,” Nicklas said, transferring her weight to a pew. “Take the child, would you? Miss,” he said, “miss. Do you need water?”

The infant made a small, petulant noise in Sasha’s arms. “Shh,” Nicklas said.

“Oh,” the woman said. “I — _oh_ ,” she said again, staring at Sasha, as her son began to cry. “Oh my God.”

“Miss, this is a church,” Nicklas said, trying to school his voice into something kinder than censure.

“Yes,” she said, her voice shaking. “Please, I will not — give me my son, please!” The boy was wailing, a high, thready sound of pure distress.

“What on earth,” Nicklas said, half to himself. Sasha turned and pressed the infant into his arms.

The boy settled. The woman settled, too, as Sasha stepped back.

“Miss,” Nicklas said warily.

“You have sight,” Sasha said. “Child too?”

“Yes,” she said. She was small in her clothes, too small for the edges of the pew. Her cloak was so long it wrapped around both her arms to the wrist. She looked like she might be swallowed up between the boards.

“He has what?” Nicklas said. The boy in his arms was tiny, lighter than he ought to be for his size, with bright blue eyes and the reddest hair Nicklas had seen in years.

“The second sight,” she said, drawing her cloak closer.

Ah. That would be disturbing, he supposed, if she were unwarned.

Nicklas sat down beside her, holding her child to his chest, and took her hand.

“He is all right,” he told her. “Everything is all right. This is a house of God, and no harm will come to you here.” She nodded, clinging to him.

He wished Sasha would come closer, not shift farther away. Some people needed to be shown, though they thought they could see. Some people needed to lay their hand on the bark to know that the tree would not fall on them; some people needed more than faith.

Nicklas had faith that could move mountains, but there were some people he could not convince.

“I go get water,” Sasha said quietly. “And milk.” And he was gone downstairs.

“You need to help me, please,” the woman murmured after Sasha was out of sight. “I have seen something terrible, and I have come so far.”

Nicklas smiled at her as best he could. She was frightened; she was alone. Of course they would help her. Sasha would forgive her, because Sasha was used to it, and Nicklas would forgive her because he had to.

This was God’s house, and so he would let her actions be judged by another, though he sorely wanted to judge them for himself.

—

“What she want?” Sasha asked, when they had fed both their visitors and put them to bed in the cot in the room off the entryway.

He was reclining in a chair before the dead coals of the fireplace, one finger crooked idly around the rosary that hung on his neck. The beads shone red in the sunlight, dim and smooth under his fingertips, and his nails were blunt and short, nothing like the gleaming crescents of two nights ago. He was looking at the ashes with his usual expression of pensive reflection, lost in thought, his brow not quite furrowed.

He was by all appearances nothing more than a man, and Nicklas wondered what she had seen when she looked at him, to make her turn pale and beg for mercy.

Sasha was big, but many men were; many men were filthy and cold-eyed, spoiling for a fight or worse, and Sasha was none of that. He was dressed in black trousers, a white shirt, and a crimson waistcoat, no different from any other gentleman in Gordavet or even London. He could use a haircut, Nicklas thought, but then he always needed a haircut: that was more a matter of class than of breed.

He turned his head to look at Nicklas, the barest hint of a smile touching his lips, a ghost of impatience and the promise of teasing if Nicklas did not hurry up and answer the question.

Nicklas was biased, he knew, but on this, as on most occasions, he did not think he could imagine anyone _less_ frightening to behold.

“She saw something she shouldn’t have,” Nicklas told him, sitting in the remaining chair. Sasha slipped the rosary back under his collar and smoothed out his cuffs.

“Here? Or Kashdar?” The woman had walked the one hundred forty miles from Kashdar, over the border from Bosnia into Lavkia, just to get away from the things she had seen.

“Kashdar,” Nicklas said.

The woman had seen a man with golden eyes and black hair and long, needle-sharp teeth who had clutched her hand and told her he would take her down to Hell with him.

She had the scars to show for it, four thin white lines scored across her palm.

“Long way,” Sasha said. “Bad demon?”

“They’re all bad,” Nicklas said with some asperity.

“All bad, some worse.” Sasha grinned. “She come all way here to see good demon, you think she can’t tell bad one?”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Nicklas said, kicking the leg of Sasha’s chair.

It had been a bad demon, though. It was living, she said, in the small church in Kashdar, dressed as a man of the cloth and dining on the sacrament every night.

Nicklas was worried it was a very bad demon, indeed.

“Well,” Sasha said when Nicklas had described what she had told him of the demon’s eyes, of its teeth, of its rough bluish skin and its constant odor of violets. “We should go.”

“Yes,” Nicklas sighed. He had been enjoying being stationary for once; he had rather liked the cot and the fireplace and the table, even if Sasha was bent on wrecking the varnish with his knives and his claws.

Sasha usually got down to the heart of things fairly quickly, however, and he was right. They should go.

Nicklas had been going to visit demons ever since he had taken his vows at nineteen, two weeks after his mother had opened her eyes one cold winter morning and seen the face of God. She had been dreaming of Him for months, and then, finally, like the sun rising, she had woken to meet the Lord Himself. Nicklas had woken an hour later to find his mother standing outside, her hands raised to the sky and the trees around her bowed down like courtiers in the presence of a king.

It had been a formative experience.

She had never tried to tell Nicklas what God looked like, but when she had walked out of the garden that morning, grass had grown from beneath the snow in her footprints.

Nicklas’s feet did not make the seasons change, but he could talk to God as well as the next man, and if he brought up the right topics, God had a way of listening.

Sasha had been going to visit demons ever since Nicklas had found him with claws and in chains so long ago, and if God did not listen to him, it was not for lack of encouragement to the Lord on Nicklas’s part.

“We can leave her and the baby here, I think,” Nicklas said. “She’ll have some time to find work in town, and there’s enough food here to last any normal person at least a month.”

“I’m take some with me,” Sasha said, narrowing his eyes.

“She can have my share, then,” Nicklas replied.

“And you have mine.” Sasha smiled. “Think I’m stupid?”

“I never ask for your food,” Nicklas sputtered. It was true: for one thing, it was foolish in the extreme to try to take food from Sasha, and for another there was never any left after he was done.

There were always scraps to be had beforehand, though, small pieces set aside from whatever Sasha had laid his inhuman hands on when he went hunting deep in the woods, and they had gotten Nicklas through more than a few hard times.

“Never ask, but I always give,” Sasha said, pushing up out of the chair. “Get things, come on. We going, yeah?”

They were going.

—

Nicklas did not have a lot of things to get. When you were on the road most days of the year with a companion who could not travel by horse nor stray too close to cities on the wrong days of the month, you pared your belongings down to what was only the most necessary.

The most necessary things Nicklas owned were his Bible, in Swedish; his notebook, mostly in English and slightly in Russian, although those were not strictly _his_ notes; and the rosary his mother had given him when he joined the church, and that he did not have to carry himself.

He had a few clean suits and a good pair of boots and a hat for the sun, but those were hardly necessities. He brought them anyway, since he had the space. Sasha carried most of the food and all of the water along with Nicklas’s rosary, an arrangement that had always rubbed Nicklas the wrong way. He was not weak, and he could tote for himself if he needed to.

He was not wearing himself out over pride, though. Sasha could carry his own things, Nicklas's, and Nicklas himself, if he wanted to, and not break a sweat.

There was a train to Kashdar from Falimen, and the sixty miles from Gordavet to Falimen was hardly the longest distance Nicklas had ever walked even carrying his own water.

“Good weather for walk,” Sasha observed. He had a hat that made him look like a farmer and his walking clothes on, and he looked substantially less reputable than the night before. “Sun not too bad.”

Sasha could tan, but Nicklas had never seen him burn. Nicklas, on the other hand, had two colors, white and red, and sometimes he was both at once. Unlike his mother, he could not ask the clouds to follow him around.

Well, he could, but he had never found them to listen.

The road to Falimen was packed dirt and the rare gravel fill for a hole or a rut. It was a busy horse-and-carriage sort of road, which was unfortunately excellent for walking but required that they keep their distance most of the time.

When Sasha had his teeth and his claws, he scared everyone. The only person Nicklas had seen go willingly within two feet of the wolf was a blind millworker in London who had not seemed to mind the snarl in his voice; for the rest, for the bankers and the dogs and the children, there was no question that wolf was something to avoid.

When Sasha was only a man, he amused himself with terrifying the shoes off the carriage-horses with a well-placed growl, because that, at heart, was Sasha.

“Stop it,” Nicklas muttered.

“I don’t do nothing,” Sasha said innocently, as if he had not just upended a chicken-cart by laughing too loudly.

They were ten paces from the road and picking their way through the brush, letting the daily traffic pass them by for the most part.

“What do you think of the demon?” Nicklas said, because scolding Sasha for being a menace was like trying to swat a fly with a blade of grass.

“Dashikiri, maybe,” Sasha said. “Don’t sound right, though. You think?”

“No,” Nicklas agreed, “when have they ever lived indoors? And the teeth are strange, if she was telling it right.”

Sasha held a branch out of the way and Nicklas ducked underneath. “Worry it something bigger?” Sasha asked.

He did worry it was something bigger, something blacker of spirit and less capricious than a dashikiri, a simple water demon. The woman had sounded like she truly feared for her life, and she had talked like she knew the difference between a weak threat and a true one.

“I don’t like it,” Nicklas said. He narrowly avoided stepping on a bloodvine, his foot crushing its leaf into a stain of shocking red. “Sasha, can you be a little more,” he began.

“It demon,” Sasha said, not listening at all, “don’t think anybody _like_.”

“There’s someone for everyone,” Nicklas said tartly. “Pay attention to the path, would you?”

“I make path,” Sasha said, “you pay attention. You have trouble?” he asked, and Nicklas did not have to see more than the back of his head to know his was smirking.

“You would make a path through a beehive,” Nicklas griped, “if you thought I might get stung, _hell_ ,” he said, catching his boot on a rock.

Sasha heaved a massive sigh, and even that sounded like a taunt.

“Don’t you dare,” Nicklas snapped. Forgive him, Father, but that hurt, he thought, flexing his toes.

“Language,” Sasha said, his voice bleeding disappointment.

“Shut up,” Nicklas said. “Stop hitting me in the face with thornbushes and maybe I’ll be more holy, you idiot.”

“‘Thou faint in day of adversity’,” Sasha started.

“‘God resisteth the proud’,” Nicklas cut in, “‘but giveth grace unto the humble’, not that you would have any idea about that.”

Sasha let go of the branch he was holding with a whistling _swish_ , and Nicklas stepped back smoothly and tripped over a white-haired foxhound.

“What,” he said, before the dog cut him off with its tongue. “Down, get down,” he laughed, pushing at its head.

“Sorry, Father,” someone was saying, “I’m so sorry. Welta, _heel_ ,” the voice commanded, and Welta thoroughly ignored it to keep licking Nicklas's hand.

“Hello there,” Nicklas said to Welta. “How are you, darling?” He dusted his trousers off and hauled himself up, applying himself to petting her ears as assiduously as he could. She was a handsome creature, if disobedient, and Nicklas had a soft spot for dogs.

“She’s bad is what she is,” the man following them said, “but pretty, and she knows it, and ain’t that like a woman?”

“She doesn’t seem too bad,” Nicklas said. He glanced up at Sasha, standing a safe five paces away, half-hidden in the brush and watching patiently. “I am perhaps inured to that kind of behavior, though,” he added.

“Well, good,” the man said. Sasha looked down on a smile.

“Is there trouble on the road?” Nicklas asked. Welta darted back to nose at her master’s legs, apparently satisfied with the adoration Nicklas had provided for the time being.

“Oh, no,” the man said. He had a green felt cap on over his stringy blond hair, and he looked about Sasha’s age, though stocky and wrinkled from the sun. “She just don’t do too good with the carriages and that, you know. Runs around scaring the horses if you let her.”

“Does she,” Nicklas said dryly. “We don’t do too well with horses ourselves, though Sasha,” he caught himself, “although Mr. Ovechkin here does not do too well with dogs, either.”

Mr. Ovechkin raised his eyebrows and stepped forward, far enough that it was obvious he was the man in question but not close enough to see the color of his eyes, the silver threads that ran through the crystal blue.

“That’s a pity,” the man said. “He scared of ‘em?” he asked, evidently unconcerned with the prospect, wrong as it was.

“Much the opposite,” Nicklas said. “It doesn’t matter. Where are you headed?”

The man was headed to Mordta, twenty miles south of Kashdar, for the fishing work he had heard was going on there. He had a cousin living up in Kashdar who had recommended he leave the fields and try his hand on the river for a season, and he had taken his dog and his spare shoes and gotten on his way.

“And how is Kashdar?” Nicklas said. Sasha’s shoulder twitched, far in front of them.

“Oh, well,” the man said, shaking his head.

Kashdar was in the middle of a drought like no other, it seemed. The forest to the east of it was withering away, young trees going to rot even in the bone-dry summer. It made no sense to anyone, the man lamented, but it was sure enough happening and nobody could do nothing with the wood, either. It smoked like the devil when it burned and it rotted out of a wall in the span of a month; folks were saying it was cursed.

“No one’s tried to sanctify it?” Nicklas asked, his voice a touch too tight to be merely curious, but the man did not notice.

“Church is all the way across town,” the man said. “Don’t nobody think the new priest is goin’ to the trouble of walking them two miles to do his job, neither.” He spat on the ground and called for Welta, who came crashing through the underbrush like a small white elephant.

Sasha’s head turned back to them for a moment, his face as perplexed as Nicklas felt.

He was not surprised that the churchman was no kind of help, but two miles was a long way for the bitter breath of a demon to wilt an entire forest.

The man was done with Kashdar gossip, though, both in inclination and in content, and Nicklas let him stray to other topics when it became clear that he did not have anything else useful to share on the subject.

The sun had finished sweating them dry through the canopy and begun its downward fall when Sasha’s stomach growled, loud enough to hear on the road. The man startled, then smiled.

“He don’t talk much, but he’s got a mouth on that belly, don’t he?” he laughed.

“He makes plenty of noise when he wants to,” Nicklas said. “Sasha?”

“I’m fine, you want keep going,” Sasha called back.

“Not really,” Nicklas said. He was tired of the company now that his chatterbox friend had given up everything he knew about where they were going, and it annoyed him to be set so far away from Sasha, even if it was for the sake of such a sweet dog.

“You want to stop for a meal?” the man asked.

“No, you go on,” Nicklas said. “We’re going all the way to the river for water,” he lied.

The man left them to their detour. Nicklas walked thirty paces off the path, got stuck in a thicket, and then gave up on fighting the plants.

“What you doing?” Sasha said when he caught up with him. “You want eat here, in tree?” he laughed. Nicklas cast him a look that he hoped held all the disdain available on the Lord’s earth.

Sasha, unlike Nicklas, could find a clearing in a coal mine, and they were situated under a crabapple tree in short order. Sasha put down his pack and took his hat and boots off, and then his overshirt, shaking it out and hanging it on a low branch.

“You stink,” Nicklas said. “Can I have the bread?”

“Dog stink, that life,” Sasha said. He pushed the pack toward Nicklas and stretched out on the ground, rubbing the back of his head on the grass.

“Welta smelled fine,” Nicklas said. “Do you want cheese?” He tore the bread into pieces and dropped half of them on the grass by his boots, next to Sasha’s head.

“Always,” Sasha said, his eyes still closed. He was wearing a faceful of stubble, laid out in the dirt and nearly napping, and Nicklas thought he might make a good hound, himself.

Nicklas reached out and tapped him on the nose. “Hm,” Sasha replied, a puff of breath, and did not move.

“Wake up and eat,” Nicklas said fondly. They had another fifteen miles to go to get to the nearest settlement, and for all that Sasha looked as comfortable as a cow in a manger, Nicklas did not especially want to spend the night on the hard ground.

“Not sleep,” Sasha said. “Feed me.”

Nicklas cut half the wheel into chunks and put them on the ground next to the bread. When Sasha did not move, he started eating them, one by one.

Sasha’s hand shot up, quicker than the beat of a bird’s wings, and caught Nicklas's wrist.

“You’re not eating,” Nicklas teased, pinching Sasha’s arm where he could reach it. “If you don’t want to wake up, that’s not my problem.” Sasha’s eyes were still shut, his face dappled in the late afternoon light.

“Stealing,” Sasha grinned. “Cheating, lying. World come to this.”

“Give me my hand back, you ass,” Nicklas said, and Sasha shook Nicklas’s wrist and released it, sitting up.

“Cursing,” Sasha said ruefully.

“Eating your food,” Nicklas suggested.

The birds were quiet in the apple tree but loud in the forest to the west, fighting over whatever it was birds went to war for, and they ate in relative silence until the bread was gone.

“Forest not good,” Sasha said eventually. No, Nicklas thought, the forest was not good, if he meant Kashdar. More than one bad sign meant more than one bad creature in their midst, and Nicklas did not relish stepping between a false priest who tried to kill women and whatever ravaged a forest for fun.

“I think we should go there first,” Nicklas said. “This thing, this priest,” he started.

“Memnon,” Sasha said out of nowhere, looking up. Oh.

Oh, Nicklas thought. Of course.

“Damn it,” he said.

God would forgive him the indiscretion, if Sasha was right. The teeth and the pinprick fingers, they seemed to match. The seven seed of Memnon made a pastime of catching souls before they were ready to go, and one of them would not think twice to masquerade as a priest if it thought it could have better fishing that way.

 _Take you down to Hell with me_ , it had said to the woman from Kashdar, and it was the sort of thing the seed would say, if they got a soul in their hand.

Nicklas sighed and crossed himself, counting out a brief prayer of repentance. Sorry, Father, he thought, although I would curse less if you sent me a little less to curse about.

“So we go to forest first,” Sasha said. “You think forest demon fight seed, or play along?”

Very little played along with the seed of Memnon. Even evil things did not like them, which Nicklas felt was entirely fair; he did not like them much either.

He had met only one of them, and only once, and it had done a good job of making him remember it.

“It might be an earth spirit that’s responsible for the forest,” Nicklas said. “It might just be angry at the seed.” He had lost his appetite for the last of his meal.

“You don’t think we can kill seed?” Sasha said, frowning. “We kill already once, Nicky.”

Yes, Nicklas knew they had. There were only six seed of Memnon now: they had cut one of them down in France, the gold leaf on Nicklas's knife flaking under the bitter black dust that had poured from its veins, and he remembered very well the way its teeth had felt in his arm before it had finally died.

“Don’t mind kill more,” Sasha said darkly.

“We will be fine,” Nicklas said, shaking himself.

“God protect you,” Sasha said before Nicklas could. The corner of his mouth tilted up and to the left, and Nicklas narrowed his eyes at him.

“God will protect both of us,” Nicklas said, bridging the space between them to lift the string of beads off Sasha’s collarbone.

“No,” Sasha snorted. “You keep ask, though.” Nicklas let go.

They had fifteen miles to go until they could sleep and three days until they had to cut down a devil from Hell, and Nicklas truly hoped that God was keeping an eye on them both.


	3. The Inn at Hol

The sun had ducked behind the mountains for their descent into Hol. It was barely a town, just a settlement with an inn and a blacksmith, but Nicklas was in no mood to be picky. He was tired, and dirty; he had walked nearly forty miles today and learned that he might well die by the end of the week, and he wanted a washcloth and a place to lie down.

The harvest season was starting, and even the entrance to the inn was packed with people, travelers from anywhere and everywhere all jostling for a space, a meal, a room, a job. Nicklas combed his fingers through his hair and sighed.

“Well,” he said to Sasha.

“You make fuss already?” Sasha said, as energetic as he had been at the first mile of road, and Nicklas quietly hated him. “This go easy, you see.”

“One day,” Nicklas started, but Sasha was off, elbowing his way through the crowd, towing Nicklas behind him like a large child.

All of God’s creation was to be loved, and to be cherished. All of God’s works were to be adored. Nothing was not sacred unless it was blasphemy, and nothing was not beautiful when it was sanctified in the Lord’s name, but there were some things Nicklas did not like.

He did not like crowds; he did not especially like dirt, either, or grease-smoke, and he did not like the casual drunkenness and lechery that brewed in places like this. He did not like overwarm rooms; he would rather be cold than hot. He did not like to have to talk to other people for no reason, and he did not much like Lavkian food.

All of these preferences were moot, of course, because though he liked a great deal fewer of God’s works than he should, he also liked one particular creation that God had had no hand in making, and that one was dragging him through the taproom patrons with a familiar alacrity.

They came to a halt at the bar, wedged between a group of three men in merchants’ clothing and a wall. Sasha took the men and Nicklas took the wall, leaning gratefully for a moment.

“We go to Kashdar. Hear priest there no good, leave people to hungry, leave trees to die,” Sasha was telling a man dressed in a green waistcoat when Nicklas looked over. All three men were already shaking their heads in emphatic sympathy.

Nicklas had no idea how long they had been in conversation, but it could not have been more than a minute.

“The worst sort of sin, that is,” the man in gray said. The conversation turned to his own destination; he was thinking of leaving tonight, although he was not sure when, as he only had half an hour of easy road left before he reached his sister’s farm to stay for the rest of the week. He had no one to join them for dinner before he left, tragically. Some company would be appreciated, yes, always. Sasha said something indistinct and undoubtedly lewd and the man in gray choked on his ale and had to sit down, laughing. Now they simply had to join him: the roast was perfect, and he could not let them miss out on the newer wine. He would certainly ask the innkeeper if his room could be let tonight.

Sasha in a taproom was a force of nature.

In formal settings and in quieter places, Sasha worried people. He seemed too large and too quick when he moved. Nicklas saw them watching his hands, watching his mouth, keeping their distance and keeping their guard up. Nicklas could talk to a man for an hour only to see him go silent when Sasha spoke; too close, and it was clear there was something to be wary of.

In a crush, Sasha crushed back. He had a face like a pugilist and a smile like a brother, and no one was sad to see him arrive. Between the two of them, Nicklas thought, they were very nearly one normal person.

Between the two of them, they had seen half the spawn Hell and a good portion of Heaven’s might, and Nicklas did really not think there was anything that would qualify them as normal.

Nicklas sighed and pushed off from the wall to follow the man in gray to his table.

“You _face_ ,” Sasha said under the roar of the room. The broad weight of his palm was guiding Nicklas forward and to the left, toward the dining hall.

Nicklas shot him a glare and was rewarded with a view of Sasha’s tongue. “You are a child,” Nicklas said.

“I’m child, you old man,” Sasha said agreeably. “I find you dinner, bed, only one person talk to, and still face.” Nicklas was not making a _face_ , or he had not been been before Sasha opened his mouth.

“Thank you for your hospitality,” Nicklas said to the man in gray as they sat. “It’s a pleasure to find good company after such a long day of travel.”

Sasha left and returned with drinks, an ale for himself and a pale wine that Nicklas did not find terrible. The merchant implored them to convey at their earliest convenience their plans for the night to the innkeeper, and Sasha obliged and left again, abandoning Nicklas to small talk over the food, which had just arrived.

The roast, Nicklas agreed, was quite good; there had been no lies about that, and they spent a meaningless half-hour of chatter in between bites of food. The merchant had not been to Kashdar in years, but he had heard the bad news about the drought and the woods. The story of the priest was less widespread, but he would believe it: the young clergy these days were not what they used to be, if Nicklas would so excuse him.

There was always trouble in recruiting, Nicklas admitted. The young people of today were blinded by the lure of wealth and ease. They did not frequently look on the church as their calling, and subsequently there were many in the service of God who had turned to it from need, and not from love.

“I hate to see a church go to rot from the carelessness of its priest,” the merchant said. “My sister’s church is never hurt for tithes or a flock, but they are country people. Too much time in the city is no good for anyone.”

Nicklas could not refute that. “Where do you live, if not in the city?”

It was a mistake to ask: the merchant was still expounding on the virtues of his hometown when Sasha returned, flush with the success of securing a place to sleep indoors and perhaps also with another ale or two.

“Nicky!” Sasha said, the dim yellow light of the dining room making the gap in his teeth look all the more cavernous. “You still here!” He fell upon the remnants of their food like he thought it might try to escape him.

In fairness, if Nicklas were a meal, he might try to escape from Sasha.

“I’m more surprised that you have come back,” Nicklas said in a low voice, inaudible above the busy hum of the diners.

“Where else I be?” Sasha asked, tearing off a sizable chunk of the roast and eating it like an apple.

“Wherever you please, usually,” Nicklas retorted.

He needed a shave, Nicklas thought, watching him eat. Nicklas could not do anything about his manners, but he looked like an animal, and not the domesticated kind.

A brown-haired man in a simple blue shirt came by to pick up the empty platter and tell the merchant that his servants would have his things packed and his horses ready in an hour.

Nicklas did not think he had another hour of talking left in him. The merchant seemed insistent on returning to his previous subject of discussion, and Nicklas had been around Sasha when he got started on hometowns; he would fall asleep at the table if he did not die of boredom first, so he excused himself after another round of drinks to go to their room.

The room was nearly cleared out by then, the merchant’s rolls and packs piled in the hallway outside the door. It was situated downstairs, through the dining hall on the opposite side of the building from the taproom, and it was not too loud.

“Excuse me,” Nicklas said to the man in the blue shirt, who was either a very well-paid barman or one of the merchant’s servants. “Does this window open?”

It did, and he was soon left in something like peace. He lit the candle on the reading-table and found a place to set his shoes. Sasha had done all right for them. Nicklas had not had to suffer too greatly, and Sasha was unlikely to be suffering either, though Nicklas did not expect him to make it back from the taproom before the candle died.

Nicklas took off his shirt to beat the dust out of it in front of the open window and then lay it over the chair. It was a cool, clear night, and the bed did not look too repulsive; he divested it of its blankets and dumped them in front of the fireplace, spreading them out over the worn boards that would belong to Sasha. Sasha got the firmer of the two pillows, tossed at the top of the makeshift pallet, and Nicklas kept its softer cousin on the bed.

He did not favor a fire to sleep unless the circumstances were dire indeed, but he could tolerate it for Sasha if the window stayed open, so he lit the coals and set the grate over them. They could be off by dawn and catch the first train from Falimen, if he could get Sasha awake and moving by then. If he did, Nicklas would be one miracle closer to sainthood, he thought, and that would be nice as well.

—

He washed his face and hands from the pitcher of water by the bed and lay down, only to be foiled by a knock at the door.

“Yes?” he said when he had opened it. It was the servant again: he must have forgotten something, and Nicklas stepped back to let him in.

“Father,” he said. “Thank you. I hear you are traveling to Kashdar?”

“Yes,” Nicklas said warily. The man did not seem to notice his discomfort; he was wringing his hands and pacing, the very picture of distress. “Please, sit down,” Nicklas said, because it was clear this was not to be a short conversation. He found his spare shirt and pulled it on while the man dithered over whether to sit on the chair or the floor. Nicklas solved his dilemma by sitting on Sasha’s bed himself.

“Thank you,” the man said again. He took the chair and fretted there for a moment, and then added, “My sister, she is from there.”

“Oh?” Nicklas asked. He should stoke the fire, if they were going to be talking for long. He had not laid it well: it would go out at this rate, and he did not want Sasha to be the one to relight it or Nicklas would melt like a candle in his sleep.

“She _was_ there,” the man said. “She is gone. I cannot find her.”

“Oh,” Nicklas said again. He set the smallest log over the coals and replaced the grate. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” the man said. “She has a child, Father, and a home. She had lived by the forest, you know, and perhaps she was scared, but,” his fingers gripped his knees, “I must find her.”

“Where would she go?” Nicklas asked. Lavkia was not a small country, though it was nothing to Russia or Germany, and she could have fled in almost any direction.

Nicklas feared she had not. He had seen too many coincidences for that.

“Anywhere,” the man said. “The child is only an infant,” he lamented, and Nicklas felt a wire of concern wind through him.

“An infant, and a woman,” Nicklas repeated. “And what do they look like?”

“She is thin like a reed,” the man said, “and her son has blue eyes and red hair, and they have — something.” The man clenched his jaw, cutting himself short.

He looked vicious in his displeasure. He looked agonized and furious, like a jewel had been stolen from him, like a stranger had eaten his last meal.

Now, Nicklas thought, was an excellent time to lie. Now was the time to cry ignorance and escort the man to the door. There was nothing right about this and a very large amount that was possibly wrong.

If Nicklas sent him out, he would lie awake all night wondering what he had missed. If this man truly was without a sister and a nephew, well, it was not his place to turn him away if Nicklas could help. It was not his place to hide himself from danger, when he might do good.

“They have something?” Nicklas asked.

“They have something of mine,” the man said, and his voice was not the same as when he had entered.

“Ah,” Nicklas said. He stood.

The man’s breathing was suddenly loud, rasping wetly through the air like it hurt. Nicklas edged back without thinking. He had not been overly cautious, to worry: he was never being overly cautious.

“Do you know them?” the man asked, turning his head with a crunch of bone that startled Nicklas out of his stupor.

It sounded angry; it sounded hungry. The slick, coarse whistle of its next exhale ended in a cough that was not human, and Nicklas watched it start to split out of the husk of a person that it had been wearing.

Before him, the flesh of its hands was visibly decaying, blue veins raising up and bursting under the translucent skin. It blinked slowly, and when it opened its eyes, the sockets were empty hollows packed with dark mud.

Earth spirit, Nicklas thought. A dalsi, a dead tree brought back to life and crammed into the body of a person. He did not envy the man who had this had once been, but he had been a carrier for a long time, by the way the dalsi was pressing just below the surface of his skin.

“Do you know them?” the dalsi asked again, rising.

The chair it had left was rotting away where it stood, the cloth of its seat splitting and molding, and the stench was incredible. Nicklas shifted and put his back to the fire. He wished he had put more wood on it now.

“No,” Nicklas said. “Go,” he commanded. He reached behind himself and groped for the fire iron.

“Go?” the dalsi replied. “No.”

For a piece of spoiled wood, it was fast, and it was livid. Nicklas brought the poker around in time to catch its left arm, but he was thrown backward into the fire grate and then onto the blankets before he could get another swing in.

“Vex dalsitae,” Nicklas began, pausing to spit on the poker in his hand, “black dirt and black coal, wet iron and dry fire —”

It howled, a loud cracking groan that was just enough like a tree in the wind that it would not bring anyone to Nicklas's aid. Nicklas rolled them both over and pressed the iron bar across the dalsi’s neck, biting back a shout as its fingers found his forearm.

“Vex dalsitae,” he repeated, “vex, ah, hell!” It smelled like fungus and death; its fingertips were splinters, sinking into his muscles and going to rot. He could feel his own flesh start to swell with the soggy pulp, pockets of decay pressing against his bones and sinews. His right hand spasmed and the poker fell to the floor.

The dalsi picked him up and threw him.

He hit the far wall like a stone and rolled onto his knees. The smell coming from the wound in his arm was beyond vile, a new reek of dead meat joining in with the odor of swamp, and he thought he might vomit.

He opened his mouth, either to yell or to retch, and the door slammed open.

“Father? Oh, God in Heaven!” the innkeeper shouted. He was carrying a torch and he looked about ready to faint. The dalsi shuddered its way to standing, and the innkeeper quailed and pressed himself against the wall next to Nicklas.

“Father,” the innkeeper cried. “Are you, what has this thing,” he babbled. “Are you hurt?”

Yes, you ass, Nicklas thought, struggling to his feet. His right hand felt cold and numb, and he could see a trail of black pus and wet dirt on the floor where he had fallen. Of course he was hurt; of course the dalsi had done it. He did not want this imbecile and his quivering jaw, he wanted —

“Sasha!” he shouted. If Sasha was asleep somewhere, Nicklas was going to wake him up and kill him with his one good arm, and the Lord would help. This was not the time to be drowsing off.

“They are everywhere,” the innkeeper cried, his eyes fixed on the dalsi. The dalsi, for its part, did not seem to know which one of them to kill first, which was buying them some time. Unfortunately, Nicklas had his suspicions as to which of them it would decide needed to go sooner than the other, and it was not the fat, shaking man beside him.

“What?” Nicklas said, parsing the innkeeper’s words. “They? This thing? There are more?”

“There are two in the stables, they are ravening the horses, God help us, Father!”

“My friend, the man I came with,” Nicklas said. “Where is he?” The dalsi stepped forward, dragging its feet on the wooden floor, and turned its muddy eyes on Nicklas.

“He has gone in after them,” the innkeeper said. “He is mad.”

Dear Lord, Nicklas prayed. If Sasha was in the stables killing a pair of dalsis, the horses must be going insane.

“Give me your keyring,” Nicklas told the innkeeper. “Give it to me!”

The innkeeper dropped the torch in his haste to deliver, but that was fine: Nicklas did not want to burn this thing unless he absolutely had to. His arm smelled foul enough, and not everyone had Sasha’s stomach for the stink of death.

The keyring was a perfect loop of solid iron, and it turned hot and then icy cold in Nicklas's good hand as he prayed.

 _Our Father who art in Heaven_ , all his prayers began. _Hallowed be thy name_.

_ Thou bringeth to the earth thy glory, and to the Heavens thy might.  _

He had kind prayers that he made for the poor, and prayers of comfort that he made for the sick. He had prayers for absolution and prayers for justice, that God might make level this uneven world, and he had prayers for wrath, that God might do a bit more than that.

The dalsi extended its puckered, broken hands to clutch Nicklas to its chest, and Nicklas laid the keyring against its heart.

The innkeeper yelled again. Nicklas hoped he had closed his eyes.

He closed his own, and felt the dalsi crackle apart and turn to dry leaves under his fingertips; he felt the pus in his arm turn to sand and hiss onto the floor. When he blinked, the stink was gone, and the hole in his right arm was oozing only plain red blood.

“You are a holy man indeed, Father,” the innkeeper said. His voice was shaking, but he had regained his torch, which was heartening. “The Lord hears you in all things.”

“He is ever magnanimous,” Nicklas said, “and there is nothing He will not give the man who comes to Him pure of faith.”

Nicklas believed in God, and God believed in him, but he was not special. God would grant His might to anyone who prayed to Him, if they asked. A man did not have to have seen the works of the Lord to believe in His power. God would grant Nicklas anything, yes; He would grant it because Nicklas knew He would.

Well, He would grant him nearly anything, but that was his own failure, not God’s. If Nicklas wanted to waste his breath praying for the salvation of that which did not have a soul, it was not on the conscience of the Lord.

“Here,” he said, handing the keyring back. “Go and see that the others are safe. I am fine here.” The innkeeper looked as though he would prefer to do almost anything else, but he obliged, and went.

The door was only halfway closed before Nicklas heard a shout from the hallway, and a comforting snarl.

“Sasha,” Nicklas said in a more normal tone. “Are you all right?”

Sasha was significantly messier than Nicklas, covered in dirt and splintered wood, his shirt torn half-off and smeared in a whitish slime. He did not have any wounds, though; to say that tree spirits did not like to touch Sasha was a strong understatement.

“Nicky,” Sasha panted. “Sorry. I should come, but I had go, there was,” he started.

“I heard, I’m sorry I yelled,” Nicklas interrupted. “I didn’t mean to worry you.” Sasha straightened up, his face profoundly incredulous.

“No worry,” he said after a moment, dripping with sarcasm. “Sure you fine.”

The innkeeper was gone, and Nicklas was glad of it: he must have looked a sight himself, but it was nothing to Sasha. His eyes were all silver, and his claws were out; he did not look like he would think twice to put his teeth through a man’s throat if he thought it was necessary, and Nicklas had seen him think it so.

“It’s only a cut,” Nicklas said.

“Sit,” was all Sasha said. Nicklas sat and idly tended to his arm while Sasha washed the worst of the filth off himself. The shirt was clearly a loss; Nicklas only just managed to stop Sasha from throwing it on the fire, which would have surely been disgusting in the extreme.

“Out the window, if you must,” Nicklas said. Sasha rolled his eyes and obeyed.

Nicklas busied himself finding a clean cloth and getting the worst of the blood off his skin until Sasha had settled to the point that his hands were only human. His eyes were mostly blue now, and he looked slightly less murderous, though Nicklas knew from experience that Sasha did not need to look it to be dangerous.

“It’s a perfectly clean wound now,” Nicklas told him, “but you can look for yourself. What were they doing in the stables?”

“Find packs, make mess,” Sasha said. “Not sure.” He sat down and took Nicklas's arm, running his thumb impossibly gently over the worst of the bleeding. It came away wet, and he brought it to his lips.

“They were dalsis,” Nicklas said, because otherwise he had no idea what Sasha was looking for. He did not like the taste of Nicklas’s blood: no unholy thing did.

God was attached to His faithful’s good health in strange ways. Nicklas’s mother’s blood would poison an erstwhile horsefly; he had seen her bit by an adder when he was twenty-one, and the cut had healed almost as fast as the snake had died.

“Da. I know,” Sasha said. His left hand drew up the length of Nicklas's arm to cradle it like a child. It was starting to hurt, and it only hurt more when Sasha went to pack and wrap it.

“Kashdar forest, I assume,” Nicklas said. “Anyway, _ow_ , more interestingly, the one in here was asking about that woman at the church and her son.” Sasha’s hand stilled on the cloth.

“What it ask?” he said. From this close, Nicklas could see the last few silver streaks that always stained his irises, little pieces of the moon tossed into the bright blue like the stars on the sea at night. Sasha’s lips were pursed, and his lower lip was still smeared red with Nicklas's blood.

“What did you want to taste it for?” Nicklas asked.

“What it ask you?” Sasha said. “Don’t know, just, smell strange in stable. Like river water, maybe.”

“Does it taste like river water here?” Nicklas asked. “And what do you mean maybe, it does or it doesn’t.” Nicklas did not personally know a river from a lake once it went into a cup, but Sasha was not a maybe sort of person when it came to the olfactory side of things.

Sasha tucked the end of the cloth into itself and set Nicklas's arm carefully on his thigh.

“Nicky,” he said. “What it fucking say to you?” He was barely the wolf at all now, but Nicklas could feel the annoyance washing off him, like heat from the fire.

He did not need to look dangerous to be so, but every sour look from Sasha was not a real threat, either, or Nicklas would have been dead a hundred times over.

“Don’t snap at me,” Nicklas said. Sasha’s eyes turned dark. The red of Nicklas's blood seemed to brighten on his mouth. Nicklas raised an eyebrow.

“I snap if I fucking want,” Sasha growled. “I go find dalsi in with fucking _horses_ , bunch of screaming idiots, no idea what happen, and _you_ , back here, fucking,” he bit off whatever he was going to say, and the better for it, in Nicklas's opinion.

He licked his lips, then wiped them with the back of his hand and turned to spit in the basin.

“Nicky,” Sasha said, “dalsi try to kill you because it want woman, baby, da? So tell me what it fucking say you, then we talk about river, bullshit, nothing useful.”

“They tried to kill you, too,” Nicklas countered. Sasha lost his frown to scoff, complete with a toss of his head.

It was a good thing Sasha was already going to Hell, Nicklas thought, because otherwise Nicklas would have his work quite cut out for him on the pride front.

“They don’t try too hard,” Sasha said, his lips flirting with a smile, and Nicklas hit him in the knee with his good hand.

“Notice I am also very alive,” Nicklas said. Sasha sat back on the bed, his hands planted beside him. He had a patch of grime left on his ribs, black flecks mixed in the pale white of dead birch-bark.

“You missed a spot,” Nicklas said lightly, touching Sasha on the bare skin of his ribs with his index finger. Sasha looked down and swatted his hand away. “And the dalsi said that she had something that belonged to him,” Nicklas continued. “He knew about the child, too. He was furious about it, about both of them.”

Sasha twisted to get the washcloth from the basin, which was now filled with dirt, rotten wood, spit, and Nicklas's blood; he had seen less hygienic things, but it was a close contest.

“Please don’t use that,” Nicklas said, “it’s —”

It did not matter what it was.

“What the hell happened to your back?” Nicklas said.

He did not have to think hard to guess: there were only too many possibilities, too many things to make a dark bruise the size of Nicklas's entire hand stretch over the lower edge of Sasha’s shoulder blade. A fist, a branch, a hoof, a tooth, a blade. Sasha healed fast enough that the most mortal of wounds looked like a bad fall in the space of a hour, which was reason enough for Nicklas to be unreasonable; he did not know how long this had been knitting under Sasha’s skin, but it should be gone by now or it should never have been there at all.

“Language,” Sasha said mildly, not even turning around.

Nicklas stood up and went to shake the grit out of Sasha’s blankets.

Sasha had finished washing by the time Nicklas was done, and he was leaning back on his hands on the mattress, watching Nicklas. Nicklas wanted to slap him, or shake him, or put a blanket over his head. He did not want to look at him, hurt and pretending it was nothing; he did not want to look at him at all, though he would be healthy again by morning.

He was in no disrepair from the front, smooth muscle and golden skin covered in light fur, a wall made flesh. He looked like he had spent the night drinking, perhaps made a few new friends, but none the worse for any wear.

Nicklas wanted to put Sasha’s makeshift bed in the fire and then leave, but Nicklas got angry sometimes.

“Was horse,” Sasha said, like Nicklas was not contemplating casual arson. “He get scared, we fight in his house. What can he do?”

“You got kicked by a horse and failed to mention it,” Nicklas said. “Get up, I’m going to sleep.”

“You can’t do anything,” Sasha said. “It fix itself, Nicky.”

You didn’t do anything to my damned arm, Nicklas thought but did not say. It was not a contest. There was no end to the injuries they had tended; there was no cease to the times they had been helpless in each other’s presence.

“Get up,” Nicklas said again.

Sasha rose, slow not with stiffness but reluctance. They passed on the way, and Sasha gently elbowed Nicklas in the side.

“Nicky,” he said, soft with capitulation, “izvini. I should tell,” and Nicklas now felt both perturbed and foolish. He climbed into bed and took a breath.

“I’m just out of sorts,” he said, pulling his shirt back off and dousing the candles until it was only Sasha’s settling fire and his own single candle at the head of the bed.

“I know,” Sasha said.

Pride, Nicklas said, was a sin. Being right, Sasha liked to say back, was not.

Sasha was facing the fire, laid out on the blankets in only his cotton trousers that were too light to walk in. Nicklas could see the ugly shadow of his well-earned bruise, the edges ragged as they faded into the rest of him, an insult of an injury at odds with the impossible strength of his body.

He was somewhere between a man and an animal, and Nicklas knew that: most days he did not ever quite look human to Nicklas, and that was fine. He was enough like the wolf even as a man that Nicklas did not trouble himself to distinguish the two. It was Sasha, broad planes and solid bones, unbreakable even when he could be reached and too playful to be truly human.

Nicklas hated the solemnity of the wounds he wore, though they were only brief reminders. Nicklas hated the way they made him look like any other man; he hated knowing that underneath Sasha’s skin was only muscle, bones, and heart.

Nicklas had faith in a lot of things, and only one of them was God. He closed his eyes in the candlelight.

 _Forgive me this day my trespasses_ , he prayed, _and give my soul unto you, as I give my sins to you, and wash me of these errors._ He let the breath he had not meant to hold unwind from his chest.

Penance was not especially long despite the business of their day, and Nicklas's eyes reopened to the whispering of the night through the window and the steady sound of Sasha’s breath. “Good night, Sasha,” he said, snuffing the candle by the bed. From the hearth, Sasha grumbled, close enough to a reply that Nicklas had to smile, hidden in the dark.

“Take better care of yourself,” Nicklas added, a beat too late, but he was no stranger to saying strange things to Sasha.

It was the kind of thing that got a response, most nights; Nicklas lifted up on his elbows to see if Sasha was asleep, but he was not. He was awake and had turned since Nicklas had spoken. His gaze was roaming over the room, and his unearthly eyes threw the dying firelight back at Nicklas, glittering like coals. The wind swayed a tree outside. Sasha blinked, but did not move.

Nicklas watched him for a long time, but he did not speak, and after long enough Nicklas lay back and closed his own eyes in sleep.

—

Nicklas dreamed of seeds, damp with dew, splitting under the earth and spilling out, climbing until they could see the sun. He dreamed he was underground, germinating; he was soaking in the melted ice of the winter and rising, sluggish but willing, for his body to burst anew and thrust itself to the surface. He was endless, growing and growing. He wanted more: more height, more sunlight, more of himself to consume the nutrients that drenched his roots, his mouth, his skin.

He was in flower, distinctly sexual, honeyed and hunting for a way to procreate; he was wet and waiting. Every touch of the wind on his petal-skin felt like a thousand gasping breaths. There was nothing he did not want, open under the summer sun and hoping, open and needing. His body was supple wood formed into human limbs and his mouth was filled with nectar. He was sticky with sweat and sugar.

And then he was underwater, sinking like a stone.

The hard slap of the icy current was like a bee-sting, and in the instant before his lungs filled with the rage of an angry river, he woke up.

He pushed himself up onto his elbows and blinked away the tatters of dark water and slick petals. In front of the fire, Sasha awoke with a start, kicking the blankets off his legs and sitting up.

“Bad dream?” Nicklas asked him.

“No,” Sasha said. “You make noise.”

Nicklas washed his face and dressed; by the time he was packed and close to ready, Sasha was asleep again.

“Up,” he said, nudging Sasha’s arm with his bare foot. “Get up.”

“Mmh,” Sasha said. The rosary was nearly invisible on his neck where it tangled in his hair, but his back was a slab of unblemished skin, no sign of the horse that had done its damnedest on him half a day ago.

It was early, Nicklas thought to himself, to be cursing already.

“Get,” Nicklas nudged him harder, “up. Get up.”

“Don’t need to,” Sasha said, and while that was true, Nicklas was awake, and so they were leaving early.

Waking Sasha up was a process of patience and effort. Nicklas waited as he rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling for a minute, then heaved himself up to a cross-legged seat with an arduous sigh.

Sasha’s morning routine consistent of drinking half a gallon of water, scruffing his fingers in his hair until loose strands were slipping through the floorboards, and then peppering Nicklas with all the questions he had thought of in the past fifteen minutes of consciousness.

“What wake you up?” Sasha asked when he was ready. Nicklas handed him his remaining shirt.

“Nightmare,” Nicklas said. “Sort of? I was a plant.”

“Plant dream?” Sasha said appraisingly. He looked the shirt over and turned it inside out. “How that go?”

“Not all that well,” Nicklas said. “I was a tree, maybe, but also me, and there was a fair amount of tree sex involved.”

Sasha made an amused snort. “Any good?” he asked, his head emerging from the collar like a volcano erupting. “For you, you know, low standard,” he continued, grinning. Nicklas shot him his best withering glare.

Nicklas had not had sex in a very long time, but he thought it would take quite a lot longer than that for him to lower his standards to pollination.

“It was mostly disgusting,” he said. “And then I drowned, so let’s hope I’m not becoming my mother just yet.”

“You can’t be mother. Then they keep you in church forever,” Sasha said, dismissive, and Nicklas thought suddenly of the white walls of his mother’s room in Gävle, and the paintings she had made of her beautiful, prophetic dreams.

“I am in the church all the time now,” Nicklas said in as pedantic a tone he could muster, “in spirit.”

Sasha laughed, a pleased bark, and Nicklas smiled as he put on his shoes and made his way downstairs.


	4. The Train Station

The road to Falimen was quiet this early, and they walked in the center of the beaten dirt without fear of dogs or horses.

The dalsis worried Nicklas more in the morning than they had last night; they were certainly all three thoroughly dead now, but he could not see any good thing that might have brought them down from Kashdar.

“They come long way,” Sasha said. He reached out and snapped the tip off a budding branch.

I don’t like it, Nicklas thought, but he had said that so many times in the past three days that he was going to get lambasted for it sooner or later.

“I find myself less and less excited about visiting the forest first,” he said instead.

“Call on priest?” Sasha said. “At least we know what coming, both ways.”

“He’s not a priest,” Nicklas corrected. No seed of Memnon in God’s clothes got to be called a priest, even if he was worshipped by his misguided flock. Nicklas did not like the idea.

“He priest of something,” Sasha replied. “All kind of priest out there, Nicky,” he smiled, a green bud caught between his teeth, “all kind of church, too.”

That was true enough: there were all kinds of terrible things, and between them they had seen most of them.

The sun was not halfway to its apex when they reached Falimen, on foot and dusty but not yet worn down. Sasha wanted to eat, because Sasha was Sasha, so Nicklas put their luggage by Sasha’s elbow and left him to devour some poor animal while Nicklas set off to get tickets for the train to Kashdar.

The station was awake enough to be busy, filled with people ignoring the queues and wandering in circles as they fought for space and tried to figure out where they were going. Nicklas was at an advantage, neither accompanied by children nor burdened with the entirety of his life’s possessions, which were currently in a satchel on the table of a Bosnian restaurant and hanging around Sasha’s neck, and so he was able to make his way to the conductor’s counter without much delay.

“Morning, Father,” the conductor said, crossing himself in greeting, and Nicklas nodded a hello.

“Two tickets to Kashdar,” Nicklas said once the pleasantries were dispensed with. The conductor looked at him with a mixture of wariness and concern.

“That train’s no good,” he said.

“That train is no good?” Nicklas repeated. The train itself? Trains did not normally turn to evil, but if it was possible to imagine, Nicklas would not doubt it until he saw it proven wrong.

“Broke down this morning, the second it arrived,” the conductor said. “Great belch of smoke and it gave up the ghost, like it just rolled over and died.”

Well, Nicklas thought, that was extremely auspicious.

“And there are no other trains going to Kashdar but that one?” he said.

“They’re all bound for other places, Father,” the man said. “You understand.”

Nicklas did understand, probably better than anyone in this cavernous room, probably better than anyone who had come in on the train from Kashdar, whom he hoped were well and not afflicted with whatever train-sickness had befallen the machinery.

He walked a short distance away from the conductor and stopped at the top of the stairs to the street to think. He did not think Sasha would mind walking to Kashdar, but Nicklas would: his feet hurt from yesterday, and he had been looking forward to sitting down.

The people milled around him, swirling like leaves in a pond. The traffic was picking up; there must be other trains leaving or coming, other places to go and to get away from.

“Excuse me, Father,” said a screeching, keening voice behind him.

It was a voice like the wing-beats of a thousand cicadas, and the hand that landed on Nicklas's arm had fingers like needles.

Nicklas breathed out against the sudden ice in his chest. A great black belch of agony, he thought, choked up from the lungs of an iron horse that had been poisoned from the inside out by a seed of the devil.

“You are excused, and God bless you and be with you always,” he said steadily, turning to face the gold eyes and pale skin of the thing that had ripped the heart out of a train simply by riding along.

“Don’t you pray for me,” the seed of Memnon said in its million voices. It raised its hand and took Nicklas's chin in its lancet fingers, and Nicklas felt a hot trickle of blood wind down his neck. His Bible was with Sasha, but his cross was in his coat and his God was in his heart, and perhaps that would be enough.

There were a great many people who had died for God, though, and Nicklas could not say in this moment that he was not going to be one of them.

Nicklas blinked, and the station was filled with smoke. The seed’s voices laughed, triumphant; there was a scream that was nothing but human, and another, and another.

He could not breathe. He could not see, and his lungs were burning. It was like drowning, he thought, unbidden.

“Aster melican,” Nicklas coughed out, fighting back tears, “aster fumus, the eyes of God be on you,” he commanded, and when the smoke cleared he almost wished it had not.

The seven seeds of Memnon took the souls of the damned down to the casks of Hell, and they took them before they were ready. The seed wanted raw meat, the yet-hopeful spirits of people who might still someday find God; the seed did not like to wait to collect on the devil's debts.

There were bodies littering the smooth stone floors. Nicklas's shoes were spattered with blood, and it was pooling and spilling down the stairs beside him. The seed stepped in the flayed guts of a woman on the ground between them, its feet making a watery slosh as it came closer.

“I am looking for something of mine, Father, though I do not think you have it,” the seed said, the sound of iron nails against breaking bones. It was close, too close and coming closer.

“Then you have no need of me,” Nicklas replied, as calmly as he could muster. People were running, pouring out the doors like bees from a hive. Nicklas prayed that some of them would pass Sasha on the way.

Nicklas had his cross in his pocket, but he was not going to survive this alone.

“I think you know where it is,” the seed said. Its gold eyes narrowed, a foot from Nicklas's face. It had no scent but violets, and the stink of fresh death disappeared as it came to stand still before him, ramrod-straight and smiling its wide razor smile. “And I think I have other words for you, Father,” it chattered. “What _you_ took from me you cannot replace.”

There were six seed of Memnon, now, Nicklas knew, and that troubled him as much as anything, because he knew they missed their sister.

_Our Father who art in Heaven_ , all his prayers began. _Hallowed be thy name_ , Nicklas prayed, and the seed laid its fingers on his chest and sank them in. Nicklas opened his mouth to scream and the seed took that, too, took it into its lungs to make its own words later.

Nicklas felt like his heart had stopped; he felt like he had fallen into a fire. The pain of it was worse than his mind could comprehend, bloody sharp red-hot agony going deeper and deeper, slicing through his skin and flesh and bone like nothing, unstoppable, unfightable.

“Our Father,” Nicklas choked out, pitching forward involuntarily. He had his cross, if he could get to it, but he could not make his hands release the seed’s horrible arm. His shirt was soaked in blood.

“Where is it?” the seed asked, and Nicklas heard his own voice in its mouth.

It flexed its fingers, five bolts of pure pain, and then pulled back an inch. It was waiting to kill him, he realized, and for a moment he wished it would not.

Where is what? Nicklas thought. He could not form the words.

“Where is the soul-stealer?” the seed said. He put his other hand on Nicklas's neck, and Nicklas shouted again. “Where did she go? Where did she take,” the seed began, and then it let go of Nicklas entirely, abruptly snatched away from him.

Oh thank God, Nicklas thought, collapsing onto the floor. Thank God for Sasha.

The train station was empty of any human life save Nicklas, now. He rolled to his side in a puddle of his own blood and watched Sasha try to tear the head off a seed of Memnon.

Nicklas needed to get up, or at least to do something from here. Sasha could not kill it alone, though he would try: the seed had already bloodied him twice, and Nicklas did not want to see it get worse.

_Our Father who art in Heaven_ , he prayed.

_Hallowed be thy name. Let thy mercy shine on the good and thy rage on the devil as he stands among us; let your eyes see the pure and close against the sinner._

The seed wrapped its thin hands around Sasha’s wrists and threw him down.

The stone of the floor cracked under the impact, a fissure snaking its way toward the staircase, and Sasha did not move again. “You would curse the devil, but not the dog?” the seed said. Its laughter was the cracking bones of a dying nation, the ripping flesh of a slaughtered regiment.

Nicklas believed in God and God believed in him, but sometimes his God did not always see things quite the same way.

Out of the fissure in the floor came the single searching tendril of a black vine.

That was new, Nicklas thought, in the part of him that was not screaming, the part of him that was not weeping.

Sasha was not dead: Nicklas could see him breathing. Sasha was not dead, or Nicklas would have done something far stupider by now. The seed did not want to kill them before it had a chance to talk, and so they had a chance to live.

Nicklas struggled to sit up. The vines were snaking across the floor, collecting the corpses of the souls the seed had stolen, and Nicklas dragged himself toward their origin. Toward Sasha.

“Where is the gava-kava?” the seed asked. Nicklas stopped with his hand on Sasha’s shoulder.

“The what?” he forced himself to say. He had seen tree spirits and he had seen devils, and two months ago they had run across a bird who could speak to the dead, but he had seen nothing like that.

Gava-kava, Nicklas thought, perplexed. The gava-kava gathered the souls of the dying damned before they went to Hell and let them live a new life, let them try again, but for all that Nicklas could see how the seed of Memnon might find that at odds with its own purposes, he did not think —

Beneath his palm, Sasha stirred.

“The soul-stealer,” the seed hissed, spitting a thousand curses at once, but Nicklas did not have time to answer it.

“Sasha?” he said, tightening his hand on Sasha’s shoulder. Sasha was cut half to death but already healing; the bleeding had stopped. The vines were creeping closer, stopping to coil around the legs and arms of the seed’s other victims and snap them into pieces.

Sasha opened his eyes and shifted onto his knees and elbows, bowed over.

“Sasha,” Nicklas said, his voice not so steady now. He did not need to ask; he did not even need to hear Sasha’s answer to know.

“I’m fine, Nicky,” Sasha lied. “Not bad.”

“Get back,” the seed commanded. It set its foot against Nicklas's chest and pushed, and Nicklas slid backward to the fissure, now teeming with thick night-black vine that busied themselves wrapping and twisting around his hands and feet.

“Lord, in thy infinite mercy,” Nicklas prayed, “deliver this place in thy glory.”

“God does not like this place anymore,” the seed said, its voice tinged with a sneer.

“Whose fault,” Nicklas gritted out, “is that?” The vines had his arms up to the shoulders, though they were not ripping him in two, and he supposed he should be thankful for that. In front of him, Sasha shook himself. The gaps in the tattered remains of his shirt showed mostly clean, new skin; he was better off now than Nicklas, whose chest still ached from the seed’s fingertips.

“Shall we ask around?” the seed said. Its hands darted out and gripped Sasha by the ears, pulling him up onto his knees. “Whose fault is that, dog?” the seed asked, and his voice was the thousands of screams of the petty damned.

Around them, the inky, sticky vines began to grow faster, forcing their thick, wet roots through new cracks in the stone. A tendril writhed past Nicklas and sank into the floor beside his head, bulging obscenely as it split the ground.

The seed lifted a hand and slapped Sasha. Four neat lines of red appeared on his cheek as though they had been drawn, perfect for an instant. In the next, there was blood welling from them in a steady ooze, drooling over Sasha’s jaw and shoulder.

“Answer me,” the seed commanded. He was muttering as he looked Sasha over, a susurrous rush of shouts and hisses, a clicking of teeth and jaws. The vines dug their way toward them, coiling in the dark blood where they touched the ground, sucking it in like sponges. One of the thicker tendrils swelled too far and broke apart with a sickly _pop_ , leaking juice and clot back out into the stone.

The seed put its long, thin fingers on Sasha’s neck, picking at the fabric of his shirt. It flexed its hand, as though to choke him, and then its chatter of voices burst like a thistle, a sea of noise and agony as it screamed and pulled away.

“You bastard,” it hissed. The vines shivered against the ground. Sasha did not move; Nicklas could not see his face from here, but he prayed his eyes were silver.

“Someone should take your collar off,” the seed spat.

“Welcome to try,” Sasha growled. The sound of the wolf soaked into Nicklas like a balm.

They were not dead yet.

The vines gripped Nicklas's neck and wrenched his head back, and then all he could hear were screams and snarls.

_Lord my God_ , he prayed, working his hand toward his coat pocket with all the strength left in his body, _if you will not deliver us all from danger, I pray you, deliver me._ His fingers slid into his shirt, and then the tip of his index finger touched his cross.

The Lord his God, Nicklas had discovered long ago, was not subtle.

The vines blanched and shrank; they dried up before his eyes, knotting in on themselves as they fled from Nicklas. They had cleaned the floor around him of blood, and he found that when he stood, his wounds were, if not healed, at least ameliorated somewhat.

Sasha’s initial wounds, Nicklas could see, were long gone, but the seed had painted him red anew.

The seed and the wolf were halfway across the station, snapping and cutting, sending bits of vine and corpse flying. The seed refused to hit Sasha in the head or the neck: the rosary was hanging loose over the few shreds of Sasha’s shirt that hung gamely on, and the seed knew better than to lay a finger to anything Nicklas's mother had once had her hands on.

A prophet had in her the spirit of God at his strongest, and since the day Nicklas's mother had first heard His voice on Nicklas's nineteenth birthday, that spirit had never left her.

“Father,” the seed shrieked, finally seeing Nicklas. Sasha’s head turned.

“Did you think He would let you stand?” Nicklas asked, and the seed’s golden eyes went wide; its face turned a paler white. It blinked, and then it stole Nicklas's scream from the air as it thrust its hand into Sasha’s stomach.

It was a risk: it was a bad ploy to get that close to a werewolf in full form, but Nicklas did not care; he could not watch it anyway. The seed’s arm was elbow-deep in Sasha’s guts as they fell to the stone floor, and Nicklas swallowed his horror and clung to his cross and prayed.

The vines around him began to die. The air began to clear, and the seed began to shake. Sasha was clawing strips off its back, long white chunks of meat. The seed was leaking black dust instead of blood, but it was pouring out nonetheless. The vines around Sasha were not dead: they were searching, wandering over his body as he thrashed and tried to kick the seed off, and then a tendril wound its way under the rosary and pulled.

Red beads spilled everywhere, scattering like birds from the rifle.

No, Nicklas thought.

The seed lifted a vine in its free hand and pushed it into the gaping hole it had dug in Sasha’s belly. Sasha screamed.

Nicklas was too slow to stop the seed from lancing its monstrous fingers into Sasha’s neck. He was too late to stop it opening its sharp mouth and spitting into the pit of Sasha’s bloody stomach, too late to stop it from bringing its other hand to Sasha’s face, but he was not too late to step behind it and grab its head before it closed its mouth.

“Go back to Hell,” Nicklas said, beyond prayer, and pressed his cross to its tongue.

For a moment, he was choked by the fountain of black dust, the geyser that rushed out of its awful body. Sasha was obscured from his vision; the vines were only shapes on the floor. Nicklas held on and prayed, bowed his head and asked for God to clean up his mess.

The vines sank back into the crevasse they had split in the floor. The seed pooled at Nicklas's feet, a pile of nothing more than sand. The cross was gone from his palm, consumed in the fire, but he would accept that; he would accept anything to make this end.

Sasha was still on the floor. His face was healing, but his stomach had only half-closed, and there was an ugly black stain on the open wound.

“Nicky,” Sasha said roughly, and Nicklas fell to his knees beside him.

“What did it do?” Nicklas asked.

“Don’t know,” Sasha managed. “Think,” he swallowed, then shivered, “think take long time. To heal.”

“Shit,” Nicklas said. Sasha’s eyes fluttered open enough to look at him. They were half-blue again and his claws were gone, but he did not look at all human despite that.

“Sorry,” Sasha said, which was not what Nicklas was expecting to hear.

“What?” Nicklas said. He put his arm under Sasha’s back and heaved him up to sitting; even that was harder than it should have been. He did not like the slow ooze of tarry blood that slid down Sasha’s hip.

He more than disliked it, but the hatred welling up in him would do no one any good right now.

“For chetki, for beads,” Sasha said. “Your mama’s, and now I have to, ah, I have to get new.”

“The rosary? Why would you need a new one?” Nicklas said. Together, they stood.

Nicklas was sorry about a lot of things that happened, sorry he had not brought his Bible with him and sorry he had not had the faith to save Sasha from the beginning despite God's distaste for him. He was more than sorry for the insistent rivulet of black blood running down Sasha's leg, but he did not have time for that now. “It was mine," Nicklas told him. "You don’t pray.” They shifted slowly toward the stairs to the door, step by arduous step. Sasha was not getting any stronger.

“Of course pray,” Sasha ground out after a pause. He was not even looking at Nicklas, not even waiting for a reply. He took another step forward, as though it was nothing to remark upon, as though Nicklas saw him pray every night, as though Nicklas had _ever_ seen him pray.

Nicklas tried to imagine Sasha with his fingers on Nicklas's rosary, counting off devotions. He tried to imagine Sasha kissing the cross, Sasha on his knees at the altar.

“Pray for what?” Nicklas blurted.

Why, he did not ask. God did not listen to Sasha, they both knew. The thought made Nicklas's mouth curl down on itself. It made his stomach turn.

They made the stairs before Sasha replied, and then Nicklas suddenly could not support his weight any longer.

“Sasha?” Nicklas said. Sasha tipped forward, crumpling to the courtyard ground.

—

 


	5. The Wolves

Around him, people were running. People were collecting all the things they cherished and tucking them to their breasts and fleeing; people were going, and they were never coming back. This place was cursed, cursed to the coals in the hearths and the beams in the roofs, and no man should stay where Hell had come to roost on earth.

Nicklas let Sasha pull him down and sat next to him on the warm midday ground. All the things he cherished were sitting untended on the table of an empty restaurant, were scattered on the floor of a demolished train station. He was not going to get them any time soon.

Sasha was not opening his eyes, and Nicklas thought he might be sick. The crush of the crowd was dissipating, and with it went the wild fervor he had felt in laying the work of God on the seed.

There was nothing left in him. He felt like a machine, empty but moving. He wanted to shake Sasha, wake him up, but could not make his hand obey.

He could not bear to beg Sasha to rise and see him lay still.

He had not let him go, though, from where he had folded next to Nicklas in the dirt, and Sasha’s skin was cool under his palm.

They needed to be somewhere else, Nicklas realized. They needed to be safe, and rest.

It was Sasha: they needed to be somewhere warm.

There were doors open all across the road. There were empty houses standing like gravestones waiting for an occupant, and Nicklas was not above lighting their fire and eating their food; he was not above many things, at his worst.

The nearest house was only a cobbler’s three-room lodging and workshop, but it had a fireplace and a door that locked, and Nicklas mustered his guttering strength and dragged Sasha across the threshold.

It was a house like any other, and Nicklas had been raised in relative comfort; it was the work of a moment to fetch the linens from the closet by the bedroom, the work of a moment to dust the soot from the fireplace. He worked without feeling the floor underneath his feet, without a pulse in his veins. He worked, and Sasha was laid down on the floor; he worked, and there was flame.

It could have been a hundred moments, and he would not have known. The fire lit easily, or perhaps it was hard: Nicklas breathed and found it burning, the flint in his hands. He was under the current of a stream; he was dreaming. Sasha was filthy, and Nicklas, too, and there was a basin, and if Nicklas kept moving, if he did not breathe —

Sasha blinked, and time began again.

“Sasha,” Nicklas said, dropping the basin. Sasha was sticky with ichor, smearing rancid black blood across the blankets Nicklas had found, but he was turning his face to the fire. “Sasha?”

Sasha sighed, soft as a breeze, and closed his eyes again.

Time did not stop again, and Nicklas felt it pass like snow falling as the fire burned down. Time did not have comment for the way Sasha’s fingers clenched and settled in his sleep, for the way his body shook when Nicklas took a cloth to the sickening gash across his belly. He stripped the blankets and Sasha’s ruined clothing and tried not to watch his own hands move on Sasha’s skin, tried to break back into the sleep of emptiness that had been holding him fast, but the reality of the day was not to be denied again.

Sasha did not move when Nicklas touched his shoulder, or his ear; Sasha did not grumble when Nicklas pushed him over. He did not swat at Nicklas's wrist when Nicklas mopped the sweat and broken bark of black vines from his hair, and Nicklas thought God and Sasha would forgive him if he laid his head down and cried.

—

Nicklas dreamed of the train station. He dreamed of the smoke, of the cloying stench of death and the way the air went silent in the presence of the seed. He dreamed of the vines, pulling him down, and he realized that Sasha was not there.

He awoke with his eyes aching, half-covered in his own dried blood and stuck to the once-fine wools of a cobbler who was never coming back, side-by-side with Sasha in front of a dying fire.

Sasha was breathing quietly and less labored than before, and when Nicklas reached out to touch his arm, he made an almost petulant growl and curled closer.

Oh, Nicklas thought, and he could not think anything more.

He should be thanking God. He should be on his knees, but he could not move for gratitude: he would pray later. “Sasha?” Nicklas said, and Sasha _hmph_ ed softly and rubbed his face into the blanket.

Nicklas felt the last twig of timelessness break inside of him. He was suddenly, terribly hungry, and his side hurt. He was tired and he smelled worse than a bog-dweller. He needed a wash and a meal, before he woke Sasha from near death with his stomach or his stink.

The cobbler had a decent pantry, for a man who had no intention of ever dining here again, and Nicklas had a dinner of bread and cheese and a fairly unpleasant cured meat that most closely resembled pork. He scrubbed the salt from his face and the blood from his chest and threw his shirt into the rekindled fire. It was not quite sweltering, but Sasha was only barely as warm as Nicklas now, and for all that Nicklas would prefer not to sleep in a sauna, he could endure it well enough if it might help.

He did not try to wake Sasha to feed him. Wolves did not need to eat to heal, nor, in Nicklas's experience, did they entirely need to eat to live. _A wolf can live on rocks alone_ , Nicklas had heard Sasha say, though mostly as a mockery of Nicklas's attempts to feed himself adequately; he had seen Sasha go a week without more than water, and a month on wild fruit and game. Nicklas would not be surprised to see him eat a dozen meals the moment he was… awake, the moment he was well.

Nicklas sat down with Sasha between himself and the fire and tried not to think of it.

It could be a week, or two. It could be longer, for all that Nicklas knew. He had seen Sasha torn practically in half; he had seen Sasha sick with poison, with plagues and curses, Sasha with his back flayed open and Sasha vomiting until he was spitting blood, but he had never seen Sasha lost in sleep, the wound still dark on his body, a full day from the travesty of his injury.

Sasha stretched out his leg and took a deep breath, and Nicklas set a hand on his back without a thought.

He was warmer now, almost to his usual furnace burn. He arched his spine and pressed the muscle of his side into Nicklas's hand.

It was like petting a cat, or a horse, the way Sasha was solid and heavy under his palm, the way the soft hair of his back let Nicklas's thumb sweep in broad circles beside his spine. It was oddly soothing to Nicklas, though it was Sasha he meant to soothe. If he could touch him, he might know that he was alive; if he could watch Sasha move when he laid his hands upon him, he might somehow make him well with his very fingertips.

He would not, of course. He could not do anything. They rarely could, though Sasha was more use to Nicklas than Nicklas was to him, Nicklas with his hopeful prayers and empty hands, Nicklas without tincture or tonic that could reach through the fog that hovered around Sasha now.

Nicklas should pray, he thought, and he leaned forward and kissed the base of Sasha’s skull before he could think the better of it.

It was where his mother would kiss him when he was ailing, before she saw God and went to the church, and Nicklas went, too.

Sasha had never told Nicklas what his mother had done when he was sick. For all Nicklas had heard, Sasha had spent his childhood never so much as suffering from a toothache, but when Nicklas was especially pathetic with illness Sasha would set his hair away from his face and tell him stories about Russia, and the wolves there, the way they ran among the men and were not secret.

Sasha reached his left arm around his chest and caught Nicklas's hand where it lay on his shoulder, the first purposeful thing he had done since he had pulled Nicklas down into the dirt of the courtyard, and Nicklas could have cried again.

He kissed him instead, exactly the same, because at heart he was a fool, and he could not resist the hope.

Sasha did not move again, but he did not let go, and Nicklas brought his free hand to brush the tangles from Sasha’s forehead. Sasha’s beard was a mess, now, thick and curling over his chin; his hair was beyond unmanageable. Nicklas felt a strange tug of affection for the wildness in him. Sasha was like the earth, rough and unbreakable, and Nicklas wanted to settle down and sleep on him, like a rest on the grass; kiss him again, like a drink from a stream.

It was too much: too much to allow and too much for his exhausted mind. It was not what he had meant to feel, his heart raw in the rubble of yesterday, and he closed his eyes and shied away from the creaking dam that threatened to burst inside him.

He did not have stories of wolves and cedar trees to tell like Sasha did, and Sasha had heard all his tales of the church, of Nicklas’s youth and his mother and God. Nicklas should pray; Nicklas should let go and devote himself to the God that had saved his life at the hand of the seed of the devil, but he could not make himself untwist their fingers.

He should not have his hands on an abomination while he cleansed his soul for the Lord. He should not stroke his hand through Sasha’s hair while he dedicated himself to God, but Sasha was sleeping.

_Forgive me this day my trespasses_ , he prayed, _and give my soul unto you, as I give my sins to you_ , and when he was done, he lay down and slept, his fingers steady on the heat of Sasha’s skin, his arm shifting with Sasha’s every breath.

—

The wolves came in the dark evening, their eyes like gold coins in the moonlight.

Nicklas slept through the day into the silent gloaming, slept until the last few sounds of the town were hushed and shuttered away. He awoke to the stifling, heat-drenched sensation of Sasha lying more or less on top of him.

Nicklas had been dreaming of the cobbler’s house, only smaller, the walls shrunken in on them like a doll’s castle, hardly space enough for himself and Sasha to cram themselves between the eaves and the floorboards, elbow to elbow and chin to chin. He had dreamed of summertime, birds singing outside the tiny windows of the cramped abode they did not have the space to leave, and then he blinked and lifted a hand to brush his hair from his cheek to find that Sasha’s arm was wrapped around Nicklas's shoulders and his face was pressed into Nicklas's back, a heavy furnace of a blanket.

Sasha’s wound was dry against Nicklas's spine, he thought, before the oppressive weight of Sasha’s body registered on his lungs, and for a moment he was glad.

In the next, he could not breathe, because Sasha was not a delicately built thing, for a wild animal in the shape of a man.

Sasha opened his mouth in a soft, moist drag across the skin of Nicklas's shoulder. His weight shifted, the crush of his torso sliding to the side, and Nicklas went with him, folded in his arms like a child, like a lover.

Sasha was smooth-skinned and slightly damp with sweat, curved over Nicklas and moving him with his breath; he was mumbling gently in his sleep, his lips laid just beneath the angle of Nicklas's jaw. He was a great expanse of naked skin and beard and rough, callused hands pressed to Nicklas's chest, to his ribcage.

In the shape of a man, Nicklas thought, half-asleep, but he was not thinking of it.

He sank down again and dreamed of nothing but warmth, and when he opened his eyes, there were new guests in their stolen home.

The wolves were thin, rangy black things, their bright eyes glinting in the firelight. Nicklas could see five of them from where he was lying facing the door, and they did not seem to want to come close.

Nicklas hoisted himself onto his elbow. Sasha’s right arm was tucked under Nicklas's chest, the pads of his fingers planted firmly on Nicklas's left ribcage: he could not have gotten more vertical if he had tried. The wolves stopped moving.

The largest took a considering step forward, then sat down on its haunches, close enough for Nicklas to pat its paw were he so inclined to have his fingers ripped off.

They did not want to come close to Nicklas, he realized, and between himself and Sasha he thought it might be the first time it was he who scared someone away.

Behind him, Sasha stirred, grumbled, and fell back asleep. Nicklas could not get up, nor could he see a reason to do so; if the wolves were here for Sasha, and Nicklas was doing him no damage, he might be safest where he was.

The wolves settled themselves around the room, complaisant and watchful. Nicklas did not know what they meant to do, or where they had come from, but they were evidently willing to wait to do it.

He let himself settle to the blankets again, his head just beneath Sasha’s chin. Nicklas did not think of himself as a tall man given the company he kept, but for all the space Sasha took up, he was only a few inches taller than Nicklas.

He was also an astonishingly restless sleeper, the tips of his bare feet rubbing idly against Nicklas's calves. The fingers of his right hand were working themselves in impatient circles over Nicklas's ribs, the roughness of his fingertips like a sunburn on Nicklas's skin.

Like a burn, or a caress: Nicklas felt the heat of it sink into him, felt it settle and spread, insistent and unavoidable.

It slid along his ribs, trickling like honey until it reached his spine, until he could not ignore the warmth of Sasha’s skin against his back, until the reality of Sasha’s body became far too familiar. Nicklas could feel the planes and curves of Sasha’s chest, the thickness of his arms, the slope of his waist as it tapered to his hips behind Nicklas, around Nicklas, against Nicklas.

Sasha’s fingers were trailing streaks of sin over Nicklas's flesh; they were torture, they were searching for something to hold, and Nicklas, Nicklas did not need this, not now.

It had been a long time, but Nicklas's standards had once been higher than this. He did not recall feeling his breath catch at the coarse drag of a man’s finger, nor his skin tighten for the shift of a man’s shoulders. He did not recall the pressure in his lungs when Sasha drew a breath of his own; he did not recall the shiver that went through him when Sasha’s maddening fingers slid from his ribs to his waist, but it had been a long time, and perhaps he was misremembering.

The pound of Nicklas's heart was at war with the slow beat of Sasha’s pulse. He should have moved. If it had not been Sasha, if he had not been here, if there were not a pack of wolves with thoughtful, intent stares waiting for an audience with Sasha: but it was, and he was, and there were, and Nicklas did nothing but lie still, and breathe, and ache.

Sasha’s face turned and brushed past the drape of Nicklas's hair, sliding to his ear and then his neck.

He pulled in a breath, ghosting over the skin behind Nicklas's jaw, questing. Scenting, Nicklas realized.

Hell, Nicklas thought, and then, too late: stop.

Sasha made a soft, satisfied noise and nipped Nicklas on the neck.

It was like touching an iron from the fire, like drinking a glass of brandy in one swallow. The sound that tumbled from Nicklas's lips was not soft at all.

Hs standards had been higher, once, but they were lowered now. He thought he would lower them yet, if Sasha would keep moving, keep the whisper of his exhale where it ran over the throbbing skin of his neck, keep the grip of his fingers where they dug into Nicklas's hip. Nicklas had not been profligate in his youth, but he had been young, and he knew very well what he wanted.

He knew very well what he wanted, and he knew very well what he could have.

He would go back to sleep, if he could; he would close his eyes and his mind and put it away, put it where he put everything he did not need and could not want. He would turn his face and his body away from Sasha, as he had from so many sweet mouths and roving hands in bars and dark rooms, but this was no brothel to smile and decline.

Sasha’s lips touched where he had bitten, almost tender. His hand released Nicklas's hip and petted down his thigh, as though he was trying to soothe a startled cat, as though any part of Nicklas was _soft_.

“Sasha,” Nicklas said. His voice was loud in the silence of the room; his voice was a lot of things he did not like to think about.

One of the wolves looked up, its eyebrows rising in question as its head stayed perfectly still.

“Hm,” Sasha replied, undeterred. His mouth pressed against the thin skin behind Nicklas's ear, then his tongue, and Nicklas bit his own lip. He could not; this could not go on.

Sasha’s hand drew up to press flat against Nicklas's breastbone, terrifically, unmistakably possessive, and Nicklas felt Sasha's mouth open again, lips parted over the base of his hairline.

“Sasha, stop,” Nicklas managed. He did not know how awake Sasha was, nor how convincing he sounded; he did not know what he would do next if Sasha did not listen, but he did not want to find out.

There was a long, taut moment, stretching out like twine, and then Sasha sighed gently and rolled back, not away from Nicklas, but at least off him.

Nicklas shook himself free of Sasha’s arms and stood. The wolf clambered to its feet, and Nicklas felt a frisson of worry dance through him before the creature trotted over to Sasha and stuck its nose in his face.

They had been waiting, Nicklas thought, so let them come and see.

He walked to the door and opened it, just to feel the cool air of the night, just to stare blankly into the darkness and not consider or wonder, to not think of anything.

—

The courtyard was empty, of course. It was midnight, or later, and no one would try the station again for days or possibly weeks. Its doors were hanging open in the pale cast of the stars, an open maw waiting to welcome visitors into its gullet. The black dust from the seed had spilled out and down the steps, the fine powdery remains of one of Hell’s children strewn over the ground.

Nicklas did not hate Evil; it was necessary, for there to be such a thing as choice. Man did not want Evil, but he needed it, or he was merely an animal. That which brought a soul to Hell was as important as that which carried it aloft. It was not holy, but it was allowed by God, in its own way, and Nicklas would always accept that which God had permitted to exist.

Nicklas did not hate Evil, but in that moment he hated the seed, down to the silt that it had left behind. He could choke on it, on the sickness of his own loathing; he could weep from it. He would see the seed live and die a thousand times, just to know it suffered, just to stamp it out like a beetle on a flagstone.

He did not hate Evil, and he would always accept that which God had permitted to exist — but for a few exceptions, and then he had some strong differences of opinion with God.

No, Nicklas thought. Now was not the time to lose faith, though the Lord did not care if Sasha died. Now was not the time to sink into hatred, though Nicklas would soon have nothing to buoy him, at this rate.

His eyes ached; his chest hurt. His body was still alight from Sasha’s touch, the skin of his neck sore and tingling. He was too tired to stand and too worried to lie down, and he watched as the moon drifted across the sky, her sallow, watery light a taunt, a reminder.

God, Nicklas thought, not even praying. Everything hurt, from the inside out.

The moon did not care for his problems, and she looked over the courtyard with a silvery, dispassionate eye. Her gaze fell on the trees, on the open doorways of the empty houses across the way, on the thin black dust and the turned-up rocks that Nicklas and Sasha had tracked into the yard. She glanced at Nicklas, and he followed her beams to look up at the station doors again, to look at the floor, at the small red beads scattered there.

The wolves were with Sasha, which meant that Nicklas could go the twenty yards to the doorway. He found two beads, and then another, and then two more, and that was all.

Five was not a rosary, but five was something. Five of his mother’s blessed possessions, five things that God had allowed her to lay His hands on with her touch.

Nicklas's mother had been a schoolteacher and Nicklas had been a blacksmith, once upon a time. Once, a long time ago, in Gävle, Nicklas had worked iron until he burned his fingers, and his mother had brought home books about wildflowers and about the carnivores of Northern Europe, and then one day she had seen God, and everything had changed.

Nicklas had not been especially devout as a young man, but there was nothing like seeing your mother speak in the words of the Lord, seeing her lift her hands and call the rain from the sky, to change a boy’s mind.

He had worn the rosary she gave him for nearly two years, and then he had hung it around the neck of a man he barely knew, a monster he had met in the cellar of an old library, chained to the floor and fed for a month on the fresh blood and raw bones of men.

Five was enough to prove a point, and that was all that Nicklas had ever wanted to do, with Sasha.

The memory of Sasha came to him, unwanted, the slab of Sasha’s back as it had bent over the horrible stone floor, the way the shackles had cut into his wrists. They had kept him there under lock and key, a planned sacrifice forty days in the making, and then Nicklas had arrived and failed in his first act in Sasha’s life, which was to save him.

Nicklas had been caught and taken for food for the wolf, so Sasha had ended up saving them both, but that was the way of it. It had been Nicklas's first lesson in the incredible strength of Sasha’s inhuman body. It had also been his first lesson in Sasha’s peculiar tastes, because he had not gotten them past the doors of the library before he had stopped to vomit Nicklas's blood in the street.

He had been hardy even then. Nicklas had set his hand on Sasha’s back then and thought him feverish, but it had only been Sasha.

Nicklas could still feel Sasha on his palm, burning under the weight of the beads.

He took a breath and closed his eyes. He thought he could feel every single touch Sasha had ever laid on him, flipping past like shuffling a deck of cards, a sudden rush of sensation. Palm to back, finger to chest, Sasha’s hand on his shoulder, Sasha’s claws on his ankle, Sasha’s elbow in his side, Sasha’s teeth on his neck.

Sasha’s teeth on his neck: Sasha’s fingers on his ribs, Sasha heavy and solid behind him.

Nicklas could not stand here and want him while he feared for his life; he could not clench his fist around the scraps of his mother’s rosary and want to string them back around Sasha’s neck, while he wanted to kiss him.

He could not want to bless him, to shake him awake, to feel his lips again, anywhere; he could hardly contain half of what he wanted, and he thought he would come apart if he tried to want it all.

He should not want it anyway.

Nicklas put the beads in his trouser pocket and knelt in the dust. _Our Father who art in Heaven_ , he prayed. _Hallowed be thy name._

Sasha was inside, twenty yards away, healing or dying, turning or lying still, silent or calling out.

Thou bringeth to the earth thy glory, and to the Heavens thy might.

Sasha was inside, laid out like a statue, like a pagan idol, strong and warm and very, very real, and Nicklas had spent a long time not noticing what he felt like under Nicklas's hands.

_Forgive me this day my trespasses_ , he prayed, and then a warm, wet nose touched him on the hand.

—

The wolf that came to fetch him was smallish and brown, with a tuft of fur missing from its left haunch. “Hello,” Nicklas said, his mouth moving before his sense caught up with him.

The wolf looked at him. It nosed his hand again and trotted halfway back to the house, pausing in obvious invitation.

Nicklas bowed his head, apologized to God, and stood.

The cobbler’s house was cool again; the wolves did not seem to mind it. They had arranged themselves like the spokes of a wheel, facing inward toward Sasha. Sasha was silent still, but it was not quiet inside anymore: the wolves were whining, yipping and growling, switching their tails and curling their lips.

If anyone had asked Nicklas, before he found Sasha, what he thought a werewolf looked like, he would have said they did not exist.

He did not know what he would have said if he had known better. There were stories; there were books of myths and monsters lining the university walls in London and Stuttgart, but Nicklas had never looked in them. Sasha knew enough about his own kind to go on for hours, and Nicklas had long since gotten used to the sight of the wolf in all its many forms.

Sasha’s claws were out now; his eyes were slitted silver. If Nicklas had been stupid enough to put his hand in Sasha’s mouth, he would have found the wolf’s teeth on his skin. Sasha's feet were longer than usual and bent at an angle. Nicklas had once measured them, out of curiosity.

The wound on his belly was open again, red and black mixing as they drooled onto the blankets.

Fuck, Nicklas thought. No.

“Sasha,” he said. He was beside him, prying Sasha’s fingers away from his own stomach and wiping the blood away with his bare hands. It was thick like tar, cold and sticky on his palms. It smelled of copper; it smelled of violets. Sasha’s fingers curled in Nicklas's right fist, and Nicklas laced his own through them and held their hands to the blankets beside Sasha's shoulder.

_God our Father_ , he prayed. _Please_.

Sasha groaned; Nicklas put his filthy left hand on Sasha’s chest in time to feel it. One of the wolves rose at his elbow, pushing at his arm and baring its teeth, and Nicklas swatted it in the face.

What had they done here to be thankful for, he thought. Nothing. This was worse; this was impossible.

The wolves began to howl, a strange, eerie harmony, and Nicklas hated them.

He hated this house, and the blankets they lay on. He hated the station in Falimen and the worthless Gordavet church where they had been beseeched for mercy by a woman and her child; he hated the blood on his hands and the beads in his pocket. He hated the dying fire.

“Sasha,” he said again. “Sasha, please.” He pressed his forehead to Sasha’s collarbone, and then his lips to the muscle over his heart. Nicklas's right leg was damp and freezing with Sasha’s poisoned blood. It was leaking out of Sasha in ugly black pools, and he could not wish it back in him.

Please, he begged wordlessly, his lips moving against Sasha’s skin. Please, please, please. The wolves changed pitch. Sasha bled faster, as though the notes were pulling it out of him.

_And God will save the flocks of the mountains_ , Nicklas prayed, _and He will save the coarse and the humble. He will save the men of the desert and of the wood, who come to Him in purity and faith._

The wolves sang on.

The blood on the blankets was mostly red now, spilling out against Nicklas's hip and thigh, and it was warm. Nicklas kissed the arch of Sasha’s collarbone, proud and invincible.

_He will save the weavers and the horsemen, the priests and the executioners._ The wolves drew to a close in a long, wailing whine. Nicklas lifted his head.

It was just red; it was just blood, and the wound was healing.

Nicklas closed his eyes and kissed the smooth, hollow bowl of Sasha’s throat, and Sasha’s chin nearly hit him in the forehead.

“Nicky?” Sasha said. His voice was confused and rough, still the wolf. Nicklas sat up abruptly.

Sasha was _Sasha_ , his eyes open and gleaming, his face baffled but no less itself.

“Hello,” Nicklas managed.

“You hurt?” Sasha asked.

Nicklas looked down at his own bare chest, at his cold, bloody hand. “What?” he said. “This is,” he felt his face break into a disbelieving smile, “this is yours.”

Sasha brought his free hand to Nicklas's face and brushed his fingertips over Nicklas's cheekbone, and they came away wet.

“You’re going to put my eye out,” Nicklas said, helplessly giddy. “Claws, Sasha.”

“What this?” Sasha said, dropping his hand.

“That’s also yours,” Nicklas said. “Sasha, it’s been a day and a half.” Sasha’s head jerked back, and he untangled their fingers to lift himself up to sitting.

Nicklas tried not to lament the loss; he tried not to want to cling to Sasha, to pinch him just to hear him fuss about it.

“Wolf here long?” Sasha said, and oh, yes, there was that. They had settled, more like hounds than hunters, their tails curled around their noses, and Nicklas thought they looked oddly like large skeins of yarn, all twisted up on the floor in heaps.

“No,” Nicklas said. “They came an hour ago, if that.” Sasha looked at the fire, barely more than coals now, and flicked Nicklas a disapproving glance.

“No wonder I stay hurt so long. It stay cold,” he teased. Nicklas's good mood cracked like plaster.

“Sasha,” he started, but there was nothing to say. You were dying? You were lost, you were gone?

I built it a dozen times, Nicklas thought. I would have made it again, if you had stayed like that. He was half a foot from Sasha and he could feel the swell of heat rising off him, a comfort like he had never known.

He would have burned the building around them, if it might have helped.

Sasha’s eyes widened. At his foot, the largest wolf made a noise halfway between a cough and growl.

“I’m sorry,” Nicklas said finally.

“No,” Sasha said. His claws were gone; Nicklas could not see his teeth, but his eyes were still the wolf’s. “Nicky, you — I’m fine.”

You were dying, Nicklas thought.

“I know,” Nicklas replied. “I need to change this,” he said, rolling off the soaked blankets and tugging them out from under Sasha’s hip. Sasha shifted as Nicklas stood, but then he threw the blankets aside and caught Nicklas's ankle, his fingers like iron through the cloth of Nicklas's trousers.

“Nicky,” he said.

“These are disgusting,” Nicklas said, because he was right: they were horrible, and they would smell more horrible in the morning, and he needed to go outside for a minute anyway.

“So get new,” Sasha said, “and come back.”

He released Nicklas's foot like a man untying a skittish horse, like Nicklas might kick him and bolt.

“I don’t know where you think I’m going to go,” Nicklas said from the linen closet. He turned his head to glare, and Sasha favored him with an unimpressed look.

Nicklas dumped the new blankets on the dirty floor where the old had been. If Sasha did not mind his own blood crusting his skin then Nicklas was not going to fight him; it was impossible anyway. He would wash tomorrow.

He did not look at Sasha as he spread the wool and linen wide on the floorboards. He did not watch his hands, the curve and flex of his healing stomach, the delicate skin on the backs of his knees, winter pale in comparison to the golden brown of his shoulders.

He should sleep somewhere else.

He was exhausted, though, and he was not leaving Sasha, and there would be space enough, so he lay down.

Sasha folded the blankets over himself as though he were remotely cold, and then he leaned up on one arm to look Nicklas over in a strangely careful study.

“Yes?” Nicklas said. The expanse of Sasha’s body was halfway above him, over him. It was too familiar. It was healed and strong again, and beautiful in its strength.

Well. Beautiful, Nicklas thought, was perhaps the wrong word.

He should not want it anyway.

“I’m,” Sasha said, apparently having reached an answer despite Nicklas's wandering mind, and then he seemed to stop himself. “I think I’m dream you here.”

“I was here,” Nicklas said.

“Here,” Sasha said, wadding a fold of the blanket in his hand in explanation. Nicklas nodded.

“I thought you were dying,” he said. “You _were_ dying, Sasha.”

Sasha opened his mouth and closed it again. His teeth were human, Nicklas thought idly. His tongue was red where it darted out to lick his lips.

“Fine now,” Sasha said. He was right; Nicklas could not see more than a faint pink sheen over the skin where the gash used to be. His right leg was smeared with dried blood that tracked up his hip like it had been laid down by a paintbrush, though, and his left hand still bore the black stain from Nicklas's fingers.

Nicklas found his eyes drawing up Sasha’s arm to his shoulder, rising over the ridges and slopes, the river of his sight pouring through new valleys like a flood. Sasha was warm above him, and beautiful was one of the right words.

No, Nicklas corrected himself. There were no right words.

He should sleep somewhere else. It would not be strange the next night, nor ever again; he did not sleep by the fire and he would do well to remember that.

“I know,” he said. “I know you are.”

Sasha frowned. Only one wire of silver was visible in his right iris at this angle, but it was reflecting brightly enough that it was almost out of place; he looked like someone had had a good idea and then gotten tired and forgotten to do the rest of him.

Nicklas's eyes fell to Sasha’s jaw, his mouth.

The wolf was gone, and if Nicklas kissed him it would be only warm lips and messy hair. It would be Sasha, alive and whole if Nicklas pressed his hands to his belly, to his chest, but Sasha was the wolf, too.

Nicklas would kiss him, teeth and all, just to feel him growl under his palms.

When he met Sasha’s eyes again, they were pools of discomfiture, oceans of trepidation. Nicklas turned his face away and lay down.

He flipped the edge of the blanket off his legs and watched the wolf in front of him switch its tail in its sleep. It whuffed, a petulant sound of dismay: something must be getting away from it. Sasha’s feet rubbed together behind Nicklas's calves, sending the blankets crumpling up between them.

Nicklas stayed awake long after the breathing around him had settled into sleep.

****  
  



	6. The Walk Home

Nicklas awoke on the blankets with only Sasha’s right hand touching his arm.

The fire was gone, which it always was; Nicklas had long since given up on understanding why Sasha felt the need to be so warm when he slept, when it was always cold come the morning. He could have had worse habits, and Nicklas was neither a fishwife nor the least troublesome companion himself.

He could have had worse habits, Nicklas thought as he sat up, like sleeping naked.

Sasha was sprawled out on the blankets, and Nicklas forgot not to look.

Sasha in sleep always looked like a cleverly designed trap. His head was thrown back, one arm reaching for the dent where Nicklas had lain: he looked like a taunt, a boast. His neck, his chest, his belly were all stretched out, exposed and vulnerable. He slept with the unshakeable unconcern of the very powerful, that there was no threat that could overcome him. He had blood on his hip and his leg, and flesh under his fingernails.

He was a mess; he was a beast. He was snoring softly. He needed a haircut, badly, and a shave. Nicklas had seen him a thousand times, but he had not seen him a thousand times through these eyes.

He had not seen him pull in a breath and wanted to feel it under his hand; he had not seen him flex his fingers and wanted to feel them on his jaw, his arms, his waist. He had not seen him wet his lips and sigh, and wanted to kiss him awake.

He did not know, until now, how badly he could want to watch Sasha’s eyes open from inches away. He did not know, then, how badly he wanted to feel Sasha’s mouth come alive under his.

Nicklas knew Sasha like the back of his hand, but he did not burn any less to see him now.

Nicklas stood up and started cleaning. Sasha could sleep all day: they had nowhere to go, or nowhere to go fast. The seed was dead, and the woman in Gordavet was likely not a woman at all, and Nicklas was not entirely sure what they had to do about that.

The wolves were gone, but they had dragged the blankets of the night before out into the street, thanks be to God, so the house did not smell too vile. Nicklas found the cobbler’s clothes and washed and changed, then threw what was left of their own clothing into the basin to soak in the soap.

He found a piece of heavy twine in the cupboard, supple and dark brown, and threaded the beads onto it. It was long enough to go around Sasha’s neck and still hide under his collar, and if it was the sparsest rosary Nicklas had ever seen, it was still a rosary.

Sasha was still sleeping when Nicklas finished, because Sasha could sleep through a plague of God.

“Sasha,” Nicklas said.

“Hm?” Sasha murmured.

“I’m leaving,” Nicklas said, “but I’m coming back. Do you need anything from town, besides a new shirt and a razor?” Sasha rolled toward Nicklas and stretched, obscenely beautiful in the morning light.

No, Nicklas thought, but it was weaker than before.

“Don’t need razor,” Sasha mumbled. His eyes blinked open, then dropped to half-mast again. He yawned and bent his knee, the crooked line of his leg scattered with shadows from the iron windows. “What’s that?” he asked, and it took Nicklas a moment to catch the angle of his gaze.

“Oh,” Nicklas said, “nothing,” and then he tossed the rosary at Sasha.

Sasha had excellent reflexes, a remarkable ear for music, and a nose that could smell a coriander seed in a grain silo, and Nicklas was petty enough to relish surprising him from time to time.

“Nicky,” Sasha said, stunned. He had gone from mostly unconscious to bolt upright in the time it took the rosary to fly two yards at most, and he looked very satisfyingly gobsmacked.

“There. Now you can say a few prayers of your own,” Nicklas told him, “while I’m out.”

—

It was well past noon, and Nicklas went to the Bosnian restaurant first of all.

It was empty, as ghostly as the rest of this place, but Sasha’s pack was sitting undisturbed beneath a table when Nicklas pried the door open and went inside.

His Bible was there, and his notebook, and Sasha’s spare set of clothes, which was good because Nicklas did not think the cobbler had been nearly large enough to fit a wolf in his clothing, and Nicklas did not relish the idea of spending the next week or more with Sasha wandering around half-dressed.

The stores were all closed still. It was not completely deserted; eyes peered at Nicklas from the windows and children called out to each other from house to house as he moved. Nicklas went into the general store to find a cat sleeping in the sun on a chair and no one behind the counter.

“Hello?” he called. The cat rolled over until her belly was puffed up, and Nicklas gave in to the desire to fluff it with his fingertips.

“Mrat,” she said peevishly, but she did not run off.

Nicklas looked over the shelves and picked out what he needed, then left the coins on the counter. He touched the oak and bowed his head.

 _As He gives in the blood, we take from Him in the water, and wash our sins clean_ , Nicklas prayed. _Forgive this shattered town._

God, he had found, did not mind writing off an entire village in His disdain if no one took the time to remind Him of His mercy, and this place had done nothing wrong.

—

Sasha was awake, glory be, when Nicklas got back.

There was no chance Sasha had not heard him arrive, but Nicklas stopped in the doorway nonetheless; he could hardly not.

Sasha was clean, and the water in the basin was fresh. Their clothes were hung in front of the fire. Sasha had found the cobbler’s razor after all: he was clean-shaven, and his hair was shorter, if not a great deal neater.

He was standing looking out the far window, toward the woods, and Nicklas could not fight the sudden kick of his heart.

He had seen Sasha so many times without a minute’s thought, but he was never going back there.

He was never going back to looking past it; he was never going to see anything else. He was never going to think of anything but the line of Sasha’s back, anything but the taper of his hips and the smooth curve of his buttocks, anything but the solidity in his heels.

Hell, Nicklas thought with feeling. This was untenable, and this felt dangerously like only a beginning.

It had fallen on him like contracting an illness: what was a cough in the morning had become a fever by midday, a constant ache in his lungs that would not let him catch his breath, and Nicklas feared that he would never be well again. His neck still smarted with the brand of Sasha's teeth; he thought he was going to feel Sasha's fingers on his ribs until he died.

He took a breath and tried to push the memory away.

Sasha’s left arm was bent, and it took Nicklas much longer than he would have liked to notice that Sasha was flicking his thumb along the beads of the rosary where they hung from his neck, over and over.

“What do you,” Nicklas started. He cleared his throat. “What are you praying for?”

Sasha turned his head and stopped counting. “Pray you safe,” he replied evenly. “Pray we make right choice to save woman. Pray you don’t piss off God too much, try save me.” He grinned.

“Those are prayers for me,” Nicklas protested. Sasha laughed and dropped the string onto his chest.

“Nicky,” he said, infinitely amused. “Think I’m pray for me?” Nicklas frowned and came the rest of the way inside.

“You might as well _try_ ,” Nicklas said, dropping the pack on the floor.

“No,” Sasha said. “You try. Oh! You find it?”

“Yes,” Nicklas said. “Get dressed, and then I suppose we’re going back to Gordavet?” he asked. Sasha’s shoulder lifted in equivocal agreement; Nicklas was not looking anywhere else.

“I’m hear seed say gava-kava,” Sasha said, pulling on his pants.

Gava-kava, Nicklas thought. Of all the things, it made a queer sort of sense.

“And that dalsi said she had something of his,” Nicklas mused.

The gava-kava were women who had died in childbirth, and they liked nothing more than to scoop up the souls of sinners as they died and give them new lives. They crafted their handmade infants out of rocks and string, tiny things that were left in fields and moors for childless and lonely people to find.

Nicklas was not sure what God’s opinion on the gava-kava were, but he could not really object to the idea. Some people died too young to know better, and a second chance was always worth a try.

The seed of Memnon, of course, would have a different point of view.

“They can’t have made all that effort just for one soul,” Nicklas said. “Why would a seed leave a church full of parishioners to catch one baby?” Sasha scratched his cheek and shrugged.

“Don’t know. Don’t know why tree want soul anyway,” Sasha said, “but we go ask.”

—

They went, though only to Hol. It was late enough, and for all that he was healed, Sasha was still a little tired.

He was tired, and he was a little strange around Nicklas.

It might have been Nicklas; in all likelihood, it was. Nicklas sometimes forgot that just because Sasha did not much care what Nicklas thought of his antics did not mean he could not tell how Nicklas felt, and Nicklas had admittedly been acting somewhat strangely himself.

Forgive me for being affected, Nicklas thought, annoyed, at the back of Sasha’s head. Sasha did not try to die very often, or perhaps Nicklas would be used to it.

They were off the road again. It was bustling with carts and foot traffic: though no one was on their way to Falimen, a great many people were leaving. Sasha was beating a path through the brambles without so much as a comment, his back broad and slightly damp in the late afternoon sun.

There was more to it than death, and there was not much chance that Nicklas was getting used to this feeling.

“You want stop?” Sasha asked when they had gone about halfway. The sun was dipping low already, but they would make it to Hol with a rest or not.

“No,” Nicklas said. “I don’t know. We can, if you want.”

“Nicky,” Sasha said, turning. He was holding an alder branch over his head, his arm raised up like a military statue.

“Your choice,” Nicklas said brightly, stepping around him. Sasha dropped the branch a second too late to hit him in the head.

The path was not wide enough for two abreast. There was no path, just the plants that Sasha chose to crush into obedience, but that did not stop Sasha throwing his arm around Nicklas's shoulders and propelling him through the bushes.

“This morning, you still grump, still face,” Sasha said, as though he was telling a story. “And I’m think maybe go outside, stomp around make you better, but no.” He frowned at Nicklas, exaggerated but shot through with a modicum of a real concern, and Nicklas felt faintly guilty.

Well, he had felt guilty already, but not about that.

“Give me a day or two,” Nicklas said. Sasha was watching him, hardly looking at the vegetation he was destroying. Nicklas could not help a smile as he kicked his way through a raspberry bush like it was candyfloss.

“I’m sure I’ll remember how much better off I’d be without you soon enough,” Nicklas added. Sasha’s fingers tightened on his shoulder, and he shook Nicklas gently.

Nicklas glanced up and promptly regretted it.

Sasha’s face was all of six inches from his, smirking softly, and somewhere in his life of devotion Nicklas had gone very wrong, because he could not think of any better sight.

From this close, Sasha smelled like homemade soap and buckwheat and a little like a dog, the way he ought to. He was on the verge of laughing at Nicklas, which was unfortunately just as reassuring.

He was hale and solid and half wrapped around Nicklas, rib to rib and hip to hip, guiding him just as he pleased, and the feeling in Nicklas's chest was not at all as things ought to be.

Nicklas could not look away. He did not need to, because Sasha had him. It did not matter where he put his feet. He could stare at the curve of Sasha’s cheekbone for hours, if he liked; he could feel nothing but the rise of Sasha’s steady breathing where they touched.

Nicklas wished for any number of things at any given time, but in this moment he most wished that he could have looked into the future at nineteen and seen himself now, because he would have laughed in his own face.

Nicklas had not been an especially attractive young man, and subsequently he not had sex until he was seventeen. He had gotten his hand in with some ability in the short years following, though, and he was fairly certain he had never been quite so stupid about anyone, even as a boy.

It was not funny, in truth: it was not a joke at all, and Nicklas would thank himself later if he stopped this now. It was not a fleeting thought to be dismissed, nor the fire of a fantasy that would burn itself out. It was not even a stolen kiss in a courtyard, to be repented and forgotten. Sasha was nothing Nicklas would ever leave behind.

Sasha’s hair was at odds with the wind, tangled gaily over his crown and nape, and Nicklas wanted to pet him, to smooth him out. He wanted to sink his teeth into Sasha’s shoulder and hear him whine. He wanted to curl into him, though he did not even like the heat.

It was not funny at the heart of it, but it was still ridiculous.

Sasha slowed and then turned his face to Nicklas, and the darkness of his eyes was a shock.

Nicklas forced himself to look ahead. Sasha let him go and took the lead again, blessedly silent.

Forgive me, Nicklas thought again, his stomach twisting sharply. He was not doing right by anyone, not by Sasha or God or himself.

Nicklas was a fool, but he was not stupid, and he would have to shake this off or pay for it.

—

The inn was still standing, but the crowd outside the door was appalling.

Everyone who had left to go south from Falimen seemed to have decided to stop here, and Nicklas squelched his dismay and started trying to resign himself to a night outside.

Even Sasha could not get them through this.

“Evening,” Nicklas said as they approached the crush. “South from Falimen?” he asked, and the man closest to them nodded.

“You heard?” the man asked.

“We there in station to see,” Sasha said idly, craning his neck to look over the mass of people.

“Thank God, then, that you got out,” the man said, crossing himself. “There’s a lady here who was in the station, nearly died, she said.” Sasha looked down from his study of the crowd and grimaced apologetically at Nicklas.

“Oh,” Nicklas said. “Is she hurt? It’s all right, Sasha,” he said, “I didn’t really think we had much of a chance.”

“She’s fine,” the man said. “Said there was a man of God in there, like yourself, sent that black thing back to Hell.”

That was sort of accurate, and Nicklas did not particularly feel like correcting him.

“Fetch her up, would you?” the man told the child at his side, and the boy took off running through the crowd.

“I don’t need to talk to her,” Nicklas said pointlessly; the boy was long gone. “Unless she needs my help?”

“Everyone need your help, Nicky,” Sasha said. “We all lost, stuck in desert, no hope ’til you come.”

“That is not how the Bible goes,” Nicklas said, “not even remotely.”

“I’m paraphrase,” Sasha said grandly.

“Paraphrase implies some element of initial accuracy,” Nicklas retorted, and then someone grabbed hold of his arm.

It was a brown-haired woman dressed in traveling clothes, maybe twenty at the most, and she was crying. It took Nicklas a full three minutes and an enormous amount of effort to figure out that two days ago she had had the worst experience of her young life, that she had a good memory for faces, and that she was grateful, not distraught.

“Father,” the man said, hushed. He was staring; a lot of people were staring. Everyone, it seemed, had heard the story, but no one had expected to see the man.

“It’s all right,” Nicklas told the woman. “Turn your gratitude toward God, child. He did all the work.”

Above her bent head, Sasha raised both eyebrows.

“He did most of the work,” Nicklas recanted, too quiet for anyone but Sasha to hear, and Sasha smiled with all his teeth.

They could not leave, then: they had to have a room, of course, and any number of people would give it up. They would have their dinner paid for, and their horses, if they had any. Did they need a horse? It could be gotten; they could get two.

Nicklas tipped his head down and fought a smile. Thank you, but it was not necessary; thank you, but please, send your prayers and coins to God’s work. They would sleep in the grass, and no, they did not need to doom any poor horses to the terrifying misery of being Sasha’s mount.

They ended up in a room anyway, because Sasha wanted it and Nicklas got tired of deferring. The innkeeper walked them up with a bemused look on his face.

“Trouble follows you, Father,” he said wryly.

“It goes both ways,” Nicklas said. “Thank you for your hospitality, as always, and I will pray we do not need to see you until the morning.”

The room was smaller than their last, but just as welcome. Nicklas split the blankets and went to bed without more than a drink of water and a piece of bread. He was worn down from walking and the crowd, and he would eat in the morning if he needed it.

Sasha was still rusting around, stacking logs and washing his face. Nicklas closed his eyes and listened, let it wash him off the shore into the deep silent sea of sleep.

—

He dreamed of the seed, its fingers four feet long and growing. He dreamed of the wolves with their gleaming stares; they surrounded him, growling and shaking their tails, but it was not him they wanted. Nicklas was between them and Sasha, and they would tear Sasha to pieces if Nicklas let them past.

He did not know if he managed to keep them away: it was gone before it ended. He dreamed of Gävle, of sitting on the hill and watching the clouds break apart and reform.

Sasha was there, beside him.

Sasha’s hand was in Nicklas's hair; his lips were on Nicklas's neck.

There was no sharpness in his teeth this time, only drenching, shuddering heat.

Sasha was above him, pressing him onto his back on the sheets. Sasha’s mouth was trailing hot up his jaw, and then Nicklas felt Sasha’s lips on his, Sasha’s tongue slide slick into his mouth.

It did not matter where Nicklas's hands were, or even his body: everything was sinking under Sasha, flushed and aching for him, begging and sated in the same breath. Sasha was everywhere, skin to skin, kissing Nicklas across his brow and his stomach at the same time. Nicklas felt like he had been filled with boiling water, like he was a glass about to burst.

He was silent, or he was gasping. Sasha was around him, inside him, above him. Nicklas was coming apart.

Nicklas was suddenly awake, thank God.

The fire was only coals, now, and Sasha was sleeping, the steady hush of his breath loud in the room. Nicklas clenched his jaw and fought the urge to pant, himself.

There were other urges he could devote his attention to, his body reminded him. He was painfully hard, shivering at the brush of the sheets when he moved his leg, and he could still feel the insistent coil of want in the base of his spine.

He closed his eyes and slowed his breathing. Sasha was sleeping, and God was ever present: he could not.

He could pretend sleep if he wanted, but his mind was not done with him. The shards of the dream would not disappear; it flickered up like a memory, as though he had once felt the grip of Sasha’s fingers on his arm, on his jaw, on his cock, Sasha’s huge hand working Nicklas until he was shaking with need.

Fuck, Nicklas thought. Well.

He had never been the sort to act on the promise of penance, but he would have to ask forgiveness later.

He was as quiet as he could manage, but the shift of the sheets sounded like a thunderstorm; his own inhales sounded like a man drowning. He gave up a shocked grunt when he got his hand around himself, then bit his tongue through the half-minute it took him to bring himself off. He did not need to think of Sasha, or anything: his cock was jerking under the lightest touch, exquisitely sensitive and wet at his fingertips. He came in a dozen strokes, if that, curling his shoulders up off the bed and digging his teeth into his lip.

It went through him like iron in a mold, a rush of thick red heat crashing into his veins.

He lay back, free hand pressed to his belly, and pulled in short, rushed breaths through his nose.

It was quiet, when the roar faded from his ears; there were insects whispering outside, but nothing more. His hand was damp and hot where it was still wrapped around his cock, and he gingerly wiped it off on the edge of the sheet.

Sasha was awake, but there was nothing he could do about that now.

He fell asleep again, and dreamed of the ocean on the sand.


	7. The Broken Church

Nicklas awoke with the first of the morning birds, which was good. They had a long way to go.

He was ravenous, and he was sore in his thighs and back from walking, and the sheets still smelled faintly of sex; all in all, it was not his best morning. When he sat up, Sasha was gone already, hopefully procuring breakfast; Nicklas had never seen anything but his own stomach, Nicklas, or a house fire get Sasha out of bed before ten. Nicklas found his shirt and trousers and reluctantly got dressed.

The vestments of the wealthy priesthood were elaborate. You could call them gaudy, if you felt the need to criticize, but even the kindest would not call them humble. The bishop of Gordavet had nearly a yard of fox-fur around his waist, and the holy men of London were heavier in jewels than a dowager.

The poor had different standards, as they always did, and Nicklas relied on God and a high-collared shirt to make his point. Three buttons ran down the right side of his neck to his collarbone, little circles of bone that were barely visible against the unbleached linen. The Russian and Bosnian priests wore their collars almost to their ears, but Nicklas did not mind being able to swallow in comfort, and he kept the Swedish style that fastened barely two inches up his neck.

He got a bowl of water and knelt on the floor by the bed. The window was open and the fire was out; Sasha had folded the blankets by the lone chair. Nicklas dipped his fingers in the water and closed his eyes.

_Blessed be the Father_ , Nicklas prayed, _and blessed be the martyr, and the man._

He drew the cross on the boards by his knees, six times, stroke after even stroke. Water slipped off his fingers as he wetted and raised them. The floor was uneven, and the pooling droplets joined and traced their way toward the hearth.

_Sacred is the cross of God, and the stables in which He died._

The door opened; Sasha was back.

_As He gives in the blood_ , Nicklas prayed, _so we take from Him in the water, and wash our sins clean._

God was with him always, and though he might stray, there was only the one path in the end.

—

The walk to Gordavet was cloudy and without much conversation. Nicklas did not say more than the necessary good mornings before they left, and Sasha did not seem inclined to say much else himself. They talked briefly of what to do when they returned; the gava-kava should know that there were dalsis hunting her, and that the seed was gone, but beyond that Nicklas did not know what hand he ought to have in the affairs of those creatures on whom God did not have a firm opinion.

Sasha snorted a laugh at that, and Nicklas looked up.

“What?” he said suspiciously. Sasha peeled a piece of bark off the tree beside him, all innocence.

“First you sad, don’t want talk, don’t want eat. Now you say, think you don’t meddle,” Sasha said. “I’m worry, Nicky,” he grinned, “maybe you sick?”

“Shut up,” Nicklas said, skirting a good four feet to Sasha’s left. Sasha was flipping the shingle of bark between his fingers, and Nicklas was on guard.

“What you want for funeral, Nicky?” Sasha asked. “Can get you mama come, make God talk.”

Nicklas's mother had never officiated a funeral, but if she ever deigned to, it would be spectacular. Nicklas stepped over a root.

“Not that I want to make plans for my own death, and not that I’m actually sick, you idiot,” he said begrudgingly, “but that sounds like an adequate plan.”

“Put in notebook,” Sasha said. He had dropped the bark, and Nicklas was safe to come within two feet of him again.

They dropped the conversation as well, but the walk was less stilted. Lunch was eaten on foot, passing food back and forth, and Nicklas did not let their fingers touch.

He was not cured. He was not fool enough to think that, but he was less wild in his blood, his heart less likely to race at a glance.

It was setting in like dough rising, he thought with a growing curl of concern. He was not catching his breath at the turn of Sasha’s head, but he was still looking; he was not without a compass anymore, but he was not sure where his north had fallen.

—

The sun was just beneath the mountains when they got within sight of the church, and Nicklas thought at first that he was seeing things.

The little church was bone-white and crumbling in the distance, doors flung wide.

“Sasha?” Nicklas said.

“Don’t know, Nicky,” Sasha said, a touch of a snarl in his voice.

The church was bleached and rotting, its windows caved in like the empty sockets of an old skull. The wood of the doorframe splintered when Nicklas picked at it. A trickle of black mold oozed from the wound, and Nicklas gagged on the stench.

“Dalsi come here,” Sasha said needlessly, and they went inside.

The pews were standing, but the table was torn in half. There had been a fight, and no small tussle; there was a streak of gouges in the floor that led to the cellar, and Sasha was kicking open the doors before Nicklas could stop him.

The reek was impossible. Nicklas covered his face with his arm and peered into the darkness.

The cellar was a squared-off pit with dirt walls and a simple iron cage that bolted to its wooden ceiling and the flagstones of the floor. It smelled like death and peat, like a swamp had caught on fire and rolled in manure to put it out. It was possibly the worst thing Nicklas had ever smelled, and he had no end of experience.

“Sasha?” he called, unwilling to join him down there for anything other than a direct command from God.

“They go through wall,” Sasha said, sounding unfazed.

Nicklas did not know how Sasha had a nose that could smell a rose in a thousand daisies and a stomach that could abide a month-old corpse, but he supposed he would have to, to survive.

“Through the,” Nicklas blinked. “The wall? What, into the dirt?”

“Da,” Sasha said. “Hole dig in, but I’m not see where it go.”

“Come out of there,” Nicklas said. They were not leaving Gordavet without a better investigation than that, but Nicklas was not spending the hours necessary to figure this out while stewing in the stink of a hundred rotting trees.

The altar was still solid, the wood of the cross burnished a dark yellow, and Nicklas thought he could convince God to clean up if he asked nicely enough.

Nicklas set his pack down and knelt in front of the cross.

_Sacred is the cross of God, and the house where it lays its head._

It was not hard to bless a church; they blessed themselves, most of the time. Nicklas only had to point out the blasphemy, and the stench began to recede.

_The stable is in the church, and He is in the stable. Blessed be the wood of this place, for it shelters God._

The floor under his knees knitted and healed, its sagging boards straightening and flattening out, and Nicklas saw the pews stand taller out of the corner of his eye.

_Blessed be the Father, and blessed be the martyr, and the man._

The table was still broken, and the windows were still out, but Nicklas could breathe again when he stood.

Sasha shook his head. “Always have to make change,” he said, smug as a serpent. “Always complain. Bad smell, need haircut, demon come up from Hell. Never good enough.”

Sasha was smiling, leaning on the wall by the hearth with his arms crossed. Nicklas felt his lungs press up against the inside of his ribs, a violent, unwanted crush of something he would not name.

“Yes, that’s exactly what it was before,” Nicklas managed through the cotton in his throat as he stood. “Good enough.”

Sasha went back into the cellar while Nicklas looked through the upper floor. There was nothing left of the gava-kava or her manufactured child; no red hair or blue threads, no blood or stones spilled on the ground.

“Anything?” Nicklas asked when Sasha came back up. The table was a loss, but Nicklas could still sit in front of the hearth, his feet on the blankets of Sasha’s bed. He had left his boots in his own room and he had brought his Bible out; if they were not going to find anything, he might as well rest and read.

“It go somewhere,” Sasha said. He came to Nicklas's side, but he did not sit. “Day or two, maybe, and I’m follow it through, but nothing now.”

Nicklas turned his face up toward him, but he could not catch his expression. “Should we?” he said.

Sasha made a soft noise of surprise.

“We could go find her,” Nicklas continued. “I just don’t know if we need to.”

The gava-kava was gone with the dalsis, probably, and who knew what they would do to her: what use did a tree have for a soul, indeed, but Nicklas did not know that he needed to fight a tree over one, either.

“You don’t want go find soul-stealer?” Sasha said. Nicklas pursed his lips.

“The seed is dead,” he said. “They’re not going to Hell before their time anymore.” He stared into the blackness of the long-dead fire. “I don’t know what God wants from me,” he added frankly. “I can ask.”

“You think God care?” Sasha asked, and Nicklas was not imagining the edge to his voice.

He was facing Nicklas now, his eyes dark and speckled with silver in the gloom of the church, and Nicklas was not cured, not at all.

He did not know how he had spent the better part of seven years without seeing Sasha as he was, Sasha like this: the wolf, in the shape of a man. A man in the shape of a wild thing, in a shape that Nicklas ached to feel under his hands.

He wanted to kiss the thorns from Sasha’s mouth; he wanted to rub the readiness out of his shoulders. He wanted to touch him when he was the wolf, though he never did, and he wanted to touch him when he was the man, to see him burn half as bright as Nicklas was burning now.

Sasha’s expression shifted, though Nicklas could not say to what.

“Nicky,” he said, shades of a question that Nicklas could not answer.

“I,” Nicklas swallowed. “Ah.” He was a fool; he was a sinner. He was lost. He looked down at his hands.

“Nicky,” Sasha said again, deeper. Nicklas took a breath, and then Sasha was on his knees in front of the chair, too close.

Not close enough. Nicklas's back was cold; the wash of heat across his chest and throat was only half Sasha.

Well, it was all Sasha, but Nicklas would take the blame for his own weakness, too.

“What you,” Sasha cut himself off with a sigh. His hand touched Nicklas's wrist, and Nicklas bit back a whimper. “Nicky, please,” Sasha said, “what you thinking?”

What was he thinking, Nicklas wondered. What in God’s name was he thinking, lusting at a touch. What was he doing, wanting what was not even his to take.

He shut his eyes and clenched his teeth.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He wet his lips. If he could not see the curve of Sasha’s mouth, he could not lean into it, but he could still want.

He was betraying himself. He was an idiot.

Sasha’s fingertips touched his jaw, and Nicklas could not quench a sound, then. Sasha was there when he opened his eyes, threads of silver in lakes of blue, dark as midnight.

Sasha’s lips were parted; his cheeks were flushed in the lines of moonlight from the broken windows. Nicklas was not the only fool in the room.

Fuck, Nicklas thought, because the threat of alienating Sasha was about all that was keeping him from drowning.

“You think is God keep you safe?” Sasha said. His fingers were light on Nicklas's cheek, gentler than a quill to paper. Nicklas found his heart pounding, and not with fear.

“Sasha,” he whispered, barely a breath. He could not think of anything else to say. He did not know any other words, in any language.

_Sasha_ , he thought, and if he had closed his eyes again, it would have been a prayer.

“God don’t make me,” Sasha said, his hand still moving, gliding through Nicklas's hair until Nicklas could feel the delicate brush of his whole palm. “Don’t have soul for him to say, obey. Say, keep you.”

“I think you do,” Nicklas said automatically. “You must.” He should not think that; he knew he was wrong.

He _knew_ he was wrong and that it could not be true, but neither could he deny it.

Faith, he thought wildly, went a little something like that.

“Well,” Sasha breathed, almost like a laugh, “if I have soul and God give to me, then God give me to you,” he did chuckle then, bitter as lemon peel, “and I am dog, to lie down at you feet.”

Nicklas turned his head and kissed Sasha’s palm, slow and deliberate.

The sudden rush of Sasha’s breath was a knife-blade. The groan that fell from his lips lodged itself in Nicklas's chest.

“Sasha,” he said. Hell, Sasha looked beautiful like this, his eyes pinning Nicklas in place. Nicklas dragged his lips forward to kiss the meat of his thumb, the thin skin of his wrist.

Sasha bent his head and bit his bottom lip. Nicklas kissed his forearm. He pressed his lips to the crook of Sasha’s elbow and heard him choke out a moan.

Nicklas was on fire, but he was not alone; he was far underwater, but he was not sinking by himself.

Sasha caught Nicklas's face in his other hand and kissed him.

He should never have dreamed of a sweet slow heat: Sasha was a forest fire, and Nicklas should have known better even when he had never thought of Sasha’s mouth on his. Sasha’s lips were as soft as they looked, his mouth as hot as it promised. Nicklas pushed his hands into Sasha’s hair and kissed him back, as hard as he could.

Fuck, Sasha was good at this.

Nicklas had been a grown man too long to be shaking under someone’s hands. He was twenty-seven years old and he was melting at a kiss, on the verge of begging.

Sasha tipped Nicklas's head back and fucked his tongue into his mouth, profane and obscene and sending bolts of heat down Nicklas's spine. He was above Nicklas now, his knee on the seat of the chair and his foot planted on the floor, and Nicklas gave in and let Sasha kiss him.

Nicklas was whimpering steadily by the time Sasha pulled away to kiss his cheek. He wanted Sasha down here with him. He wanted a hell of a lot more than kisses.

“Sasha,” Nicklas gasped. “Fuck.”

“Nicky,” Sasha growled, his lips trailing from Nicklas's temple to his jaw, and, oh. Nicklas could not stop himself from turning his face away, from arching his neck. Sasha kissed him, and Nicklas made an impatient sound.

Sasha kissed him again, and then his teeth were pressed against the cord of Nicklas's neck, pushing a whine from Nicklas's throat.

He was dying; his skin felt like it was blistering under Sasha’s mouth. He wanted Sasha’s lips forever, everywhere. He never wanted Sasha to stop.

“I’m not dream that,” Sasha said, breathless.

“No,” Nicklas panted. “No. Sasha, please.”

Sasha’s fingers drew up Nicklas's arms from his wrists to his shoulders, his mouth dipping to the base of Nicklas's throat, kissing over the thin fabric of his shirt.

Oh God, Nicklas thought, and not in benediction.

Oh, _hell_ , he thought.

Nicklas opened his eyes and stared blankly at the wall. The once-rotting boards came into focus, newly planed and smoothed.

Sasha was perfect, one hand under Nicklas's hip and the other behind his neck; Sasha was blazing hot where he was flat against Nicklas. Sasha’s knee shifted between Nicklas's legs, a fleeting, white-hot pressure that made Nicklas's vision spark. They were in a church.

Sasha was going to unravel him, and Nicklas going to curse himself for it.

“Sasha,” he groaned, and whatever he sounded like, there was enough recalcitrance there to make Sasha pause.

Nicklas set his forehead against Sasha’s breastbone and tried to breathe normally.

Sasha unfolded himself and slipped back until he was standing over Nicklas. His eyes were half silver, liquid color spilling into his irises.

“Sorry,” he rasped, hoarse and low, and Nicklas shivered. He wanted to make him say a great deal more than _sorry_ in that voice.

“It’s all right,” Nicklas said. His skin still felt too tight, and he would have given a year of his life to get Sasha’s hands back on him.

No, he told himself. It would be more than a year of suffering, for that.

“Sorry,” Sasha said again. “I’m,” he licked his lips and stepped back, almost to the hearth. “Know you don’t want.”

“Sasha, that’s not,” Nicklas started, but he did not know what else he could say.

I want, he thought. He wanted so badly he could choke on it. He stood up and pressed his knuckles to his eyes.

He wanted, but he did not want to look at Sasha, endlessly broad and dark-eyed against the ashes of the fire. He did not want to see the roughness in his breath and not kiss him; he did not want to see the strength of his arms and not touch him.

“Go sleep, Nicky. Go pray,” Sasha said, his face shuttered. “I’m sleep here.”

Bile rose in Nicklas's throat. He wanted to vomit. He would rather have been in the rotting shell of the church again, than this.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he meant it. It tasted like poison, but Sasha’s mouth softened slightly.

He was more than sorry. He was a thousand things; he was a war contained in the bones of a man.

“Know you sorry,” Sasha said quietly. “Know better.”

Nicklas did not know if Sasha meant himself or Nicklas, but he did: they both did.

Nicklas's room was cold, though he could feel a faint warmth from the fire as Sasha built it, and he turned his face into the pillow and lay still until he heard the birds start to sing.

—

Sasha was gone from the hearth when Nicklas ventured out into the sunlight.

Nicklas sat in the first pew and looked at the broken table and wondered what he had done, what he was doing, but nothing came to him.

The easiest task, he thought, would be the one that had nothing to do with him, and he turned his mind toward the gava-kava, toward Kashdar and the dying forest that longed for a soul.

The dalsis had not wanted the infant alone, though they had wanted it: the woman was gone, too, and with her all her things, scant though they were. Nicklas could not discount that she had something else of theirs, or something better than a single soul, but he could not imagine what a tree would lie awake at night, dreaming of.

Was the forest even sick, still? Had it healed itself with the mystery of the human spirit?

That, at least, Nicklas could answer, and he went to find some paper and a few coins.

—

Gordavet had one terrible winery, three modest bakeries, one and a half churches, and a letter-keeper: an old, old man with a thick braid of gray hair that wound down to his elbow and a dozen pure white pigeons who rested in a dozen wrought-iron cages of Nicklas's design, when they were not carrying correspondence.

Nicklas could not find Sasha before he set out for the letter-keeper’s house, but he did not bring Sasha around there, in any case. It seemed a disaster in the making, and Nicklas would not be to blame for the entirety of the postal system flying away in terror.

He had six bronze coins and three four-inch rolls of paper, and a healthy amount of hope that at least one of their erstwhile compatriots had stayed put.

_Kashdar priest seed of Memnon_ , he had written on the rolls. _Killed in Falimen. Kashdar forest dalsis, dying, or well? Send word immediately. Alex sends regards. -Nicklas_

Three letters, three birds, and a day and half until an answer at the earliest. Nicklas shook the letter-keeper’s hand, checked the fittings of the cages, and went home to his empty church.


	8. The Tunnel

It was not empty, when he set foot inside.

There was wood piled by the door and a series of increasingly terrifying gardening implements laid out across the floor. The cellar doors were open, and there was the steady, rough sound of digging, of metal hitting rocks and roots.

“Sasha?” Nicklas called.

Sasha was a creature of many talents. He could memorize a poem in the space of a single recitation, and he could do figures in his head. He could lift nearly twice his own weight when he needed to, he had the stamina of a steam engine, and he could get himself filthier than anyone Nicklas had ever met.

He was not quite head-to-toe in dirt, but he was making a go of it. His hands were black to the wrists with spongy dark earth, and his chest was so caked with dirt that Nicklas could not tell if he was even wearing his shirt; for the sake of their laundry, he hoped not. The rosary was nearly invisible at this throat.

“Nicky,” Sasha said breathlessly. “Where you go?”

“Oh, to town,” Nicklas said. “I’m sorry.”

“No, is fine,” Sasha said. He brushed the crumbs of dirt off his hands, a minor dent in the mountain of effort that would need to be made, and Nicklas shook his head and went to get the fire going.

Sasha had moved his blankets to the side and fetched a pot and a half-tub of water by the time Nicklas had got the hearth warm. Nicklas let him settle the pot to the hook and sat down on the floor beside him to talk.

He was not sure which words he might use to begin.

Last night pressed on him, though it should not: it was only Sasha, and he was as he always was, cross-legged and leaning against the smooth stone of the hearth, his eyes all the brighter for the dust that shadowed his cheeks. There was no reason to follow the movement of his hands as he picked dirt from his fingernails, no reason to mark the deep pink of his lips as they pursed in concentration, but Nicklas had not been seeing much of reason, lately.

“I sent word to Laich, in Mordta,” Nicklas said. Sasha sat up, his brows furrowing under the heavy fall of his hair.

“You send by bird?” Sasha asked, and Nicklas nodded.

“It’s fast,” he said, “and I sent one to Getty and one to Semin, too, in case they get lost.”

“What you say?” Sasha said.

“I said you said hello,” Nicklas replied, smiling, and Sasha snorted.

“They know I say,” he said. “They send back just to say they think I’m lazy, make you write.”

“Hopefully they’ll add that the forest is alive, or that there’s a new priest already,” Nicklas said. He ran his hands over his face, then through his hair, arching his back until the bones of his neck protested. “I don’t know what would make me want to go after them, but it seemed like I ought to check.”

“Always check,” Sasha said, standing. “Say you don’t want meddle, but you always check.”

Nicklas glared daggers at his back while he tipped half the hot water into the tub, and then Sasha picked up the rag, dunked his head in the water, and set to scrubbing his neck, and Nicklas found himself fighting to look away.

It was only Sasha, whose hands had cradled Nicklas's head like it was glass; it was only Sasha, whose pulse Nicklas could still feel against his skin, whose breath Nicklas could still remember on his throat.

 _Please_ , Nicklas had said, lost in Sasha’s arms, and he could not stop the sentiment from returning.

A snake of water slithered down Sasha’s back, dancing over his spine, and Nicklas wanted to catch it, trace it, be it. Sasha breathed in, a great swell of air that stretched the bare skin over his ribs, and turned.

“Nicky,” he said, and oh.

“Yes?” Nicklas said. His voice was short of normal, but it was only the illusion that needed to be maintained. There was no reason to pull the curtain back if it had been closed once already. It did not matter what state he was in behind it.

Sasha’s hands were clean, and most of his arms. His face was washed, tan under the sheen of water. Nicklas wanted to draw his fingers along the line of dust that cut across his chest below his nipples, wanted to smooth his hands down Sasha’s skin until he could feel the grit on his palms.

“Nicky,” Sasha said again, low and impatient, and Nicklas looked up.

“Sorry,” Nicklas said thoughtlessly, though he was not sure what exactly he was sorriest for.

“You don’t want,” Sasha said, and it hung in the air, suspended between a question and a reminder. Nicklas wanted nothing more than to deny it.

Nicklas blew out a breath and looked down. He was a fool, but it was only Sasha, and Sasha would understand him, whatever he said. “I _should_ not want,” he said baldly, though it tasted like a lie.

He should not want; he was sure of it. There was no question in his mind, only his heart, and he did not doubt God, but he began to doubt himself.

Sasha was collecting his things, setting the rag to soak in the dirty water and turning his back to the fire, and Nicklas could not catch his eyes. Nicklas would think he looked sad, if he did not know better.

He did not know better, in fact. He did not know this side of Sasha, and he could not say what it was that Sasha wanted, or what he saw when he looked back at Nicklas. “Sasha?” Nicklas said, stopping him before he could stand.

Sasha was something more than sad, Nicklas thought, as their eyes met. Sasha was angry, though not at Nicklas, and Nicklas wanted nothing more than to wipe it from his brow, to wipe whatever was troubling him from the earth entirely.

“Of course you don’t want,” Sasha said. “I’m go back, dig. Maybe get to tunnel, I think.”

Of course Nicklas did not want: of course he did not want to sink his fingers into Sasha’s wet hair. Of course he did not want to feel Sasha’s lips on him again, Sasha’s fingers on his cheeks, Sasha’s teeth on his skin. He did not want Sasha over him and surrounding him, holding him close, holding him there.

Of course not.

“Of course?” Nicklas asked, before he could think. Sasha’s hand paused as he went to rise, his mouth slightly parted, his face drenched in incredulity.

“What?” Sasha said. “You forget, Nicky? Yes. Of course,” he spat, and Nicklas wanted more than just to kiss him.

It was only midday, and the windows were broken open, the shutters still hanging loose from their temporary death. The sunlight split the room, drowning out the dim glow of the fire, and Nicklas wanted to wrap him in it like a blanket, rinse him in it until the sourness in his voice was washed away.

“You know I want you,” Nicklas said. “You know that.” _For the honest man will know no sanction for his words in the eyes of God_ , Nicklas thought, but that might not apply here.

He did not want to think about God’s eyes; he did not want to think about the judgment of God and the judgment of man, because he could not choose between righteousness and rightness, between the cross and the look on Sasha’s face.

“Nicky,” Sasha said, painful with hope, and the choice was made.

There was half a yard between them, and Sasha did not move as Nicklas shifted forward, nor as he set his hand on the hearth beside Sasha’s head. He did not look away from Nicklas's eyes, and he did not blink, until Nicklas kissed him.

He did not know if he could be forgiven for this, and very thought filled his stomach with ice. He did not know if he could ask God for His grace, knowing what he had chosen, but he could not send Sasha away, either.

Sasha’s hands came to Nicklas's jaw, and he stopped thinking.

It was too new to be familiar. Sasha was too solid, too real, and far too intent on driving Nicklas mad. Sasha groaned into his mouth, a rumbling, animal growl, and Nicklas shivered. He was leaning back, his mouth parted, Sasha’s tongue running along his lips, Sasha’s hand tight on the back of his neck, and Nicklas barely had a chance to find Sasha’s shoulders before he was sliding to the floor under the strong cage of Sasha’s body.

Sasha’s mouth was on his neck, his jaw. Sasha’s fingers were flicking open the buttons of his collar, and Nicklas was going to combust.

“Oh, fuck,” he gasped out. Sasha shuddered above him, his teeth digging too-hard into Nicklas's skin, ah, hell. “Sasha, don’t, oh, _shit_.”

“No?” Sasha said, a hint of his old teasing under the ragged snarl of want, and Nicklas, Nicklas would say _yes_ to anything.

Sasha bit his shoulder again, not as hard as last time, but hardly gentle. Nicklas could feel him smile. Fine, he thought.

Nicklas slid his hands down to Sasha’s waist and pulled him down, hip to hip, and Sasha’s answering moan was a triumph. Nicklas wanted him closer, wanted to touch his skin, wanted more than the press of his cock through their trousers, but, oh, maybe that was enough. Sasha slid his leg between Nicklas's, and Nicklas bit his own lip and fought the lightning racing up his spine.

“Sasha,” Nicklas panted, “don’t be an ass.”

“Nicky, I don’t,” Sasha said. Fuck, he wasn’t teasing now: he was shaking, his hips rocking minutely against Nicklas's, soft, broken noises falling from his lips, and Nicklas had never wanted anything more than to see him come apart.

Nicklas set his foot under him and thrust up. His tongue was in Sasha’s mouth, the blinding pressure of Sasha’s hip against his cock almost too much to bear. It had been a long time since he had come without a hand on him, but he would not mind right now.

“Nicky,” Sasha said, hoarse in Nicklas's ear. “Nicky, fuck, you sure?”

There were worse times for worse questions, Nicklas thought, but not many.

 _Yes_ , he wanted to say, _yes, please, don’t fucking stop_ , and some part of him wanted never to have begun this at all.

“Sasha,” he whimpered. Hell, please.

“Nicky, I’m asking you,” Sasha said, pulling away, and Nicklas fought the urge to hit him.

He was burning; he was a moment from coming, laid out on the fucking floor as Sasha carefully lifted himself up and back, and Nicklas tried to find a breath.

He flexed his fingers at his side and pressed his teeth into his lip. Fuck. If Sasha was not here, he would not be so still.

If Sasha was not here, of course, he would not be in this state.

“Nicky,” Sasha groaned. His forehead dropped to brush against Nicklas's chest.

“ _Sasha_ ,” Nicklas replied, but he could not think of anything else that was fit to say.

“Yesterday, you don’t want,” Sasha said, and that, that was not quite true.

Yesterday he had thought he knew what was right. Yesterday he had not seen the glimmer of misery in Sasha’s eyes; yesterday he had not been willing, and today he was only half-there. Tomorrow he would have no objection at all.

Tomorrow they would still be in a church: tomorrow, Nicklas would go too far to come back. Nicklas closed his eyes and fought the wash of horror in his veins. He did not know what he was doing, only that he was going to do it, but that did not mean he was, as Sasha had wanted to know, sure.

He opened his eyes and found Sasha’s, and then Sasha leaned down and kissed him on the lips, close-mouthed and more chaste than Nicklas could have managed.

“You don’t know,” Sasha said, “that's fine, Nicky.”

 _I’m going to give in eventually_ , Nicklas wanted to say, but even the thought was anathema. Maybe he would wake up tomorrow with a shred of moral fortitude; maybe he would awake a man of some virtue. He thought of Sasha’s face, of the sting in his voice.

No, he would not.

“Of course I want you,” Nicklas said softly, smoothing Sasha’s damp hair from his brow.

Nicklas had seen miracles. Nicklas had made them, had asked for the wonder of the Lord and seen it given. Nicklas had rained fire on the damned as a gift from God, but he had never done anything so good in his life as this.

God had not made Sasha, and in his moment of sin, Nicklas let himself admit that he felt it was, at best, an egregious oversight on the part of the Lord.

“I'm going to dig,” Sasha said, pushing away from Nicklas's hand with obvious reluctance. "Promise stay clean." He smiled down at Nicklas, and Nicklas was helpless not to return it.

He gone in the next moment, stomping down the stairs to the cellar, and Nicklas lay in the sweltering heat of the dying fire and the summer sun and tried not to think at all.

—

He had to think, in time. There was no stopping the swell of thoughts, even if they could not all be where he wanted them.

Sasha, he thought, and then forced himself to a better avenue. What on earth was Sasha digging toward?

Nicklas sat up on his elbows, and then his heels. His hair was sticking to his cheeks, glued in lazy twirls by the residue of water from Sasha’s face, and he forced it behind his ears and found his feet again.

 _Maybe get to tunnel, I think_ , he had said, which was not precisely what Nicklas would have predicted when confronted with a resurrected tree root absconding with a soul-stealer and her manufactured baby, but then he did not know what else he should expect, either. Perhaps they had dug a tunnel all the way to Kashdar, though that seemed insurmountably impractical, not least because they surely could not have dug it _here_. They had not even known where the gava-kava was, in Hol. Nicklas was without a few pieces of crucial information, he felt, and he was not convinced Sasha would be finding him more than rocks and more questions, under there.

Sasha, he thought, and he pushed the thought away.

Nicklas was without a great deal of data on a number of key topics. He collected the wash basin and the rag and carried them outside; he could not worry his way to discovery, but he could worry his way to cleanliness, and it was better than nothing.

—

The church in Gordavet had an altar, pews, a fireplace, a table with a split running clear down its length, end to end, and a small room off the entryway, where Nicklas slept and kept his books.

They were not his books, in any sense of the word beyond simple possession; they had almost all been here when he arrived, and what few he had brought with him were spirited from the churches they had passed, from the rooms where they had rested, from the empty buildings they had swept free of the devil’s cobwebs.

Only one was from Sasha’s library, the cold hole in the ground where Nicklas had tried very valiantly to die for him, and he had carried it for a very long time.

He must have thought he would be coming back here, he realized, lifting it from the shelf, or he would never have left it behind.

It was pale calfskin, leather-bound and delicate, and in it was a list of names as long as the royal ledger. Nicklas set it on the bed and slipped off his boots so he could tuck his feet beneath him and read.

It was in German, which was not Nicklas's strongest language, but he could muddle through well enough to understand the implications of a popular fiction or a simple almanac, and he had read this tome enough times to recite it, if he wished.

He would never recite it: he did not think magic was in his repertoire, but he did not trust a single word on the page.

 _Düster, Blana, Fingrau_ , read the first page. _Here are the names of the dead._

It held the names of the demons of Hell and the names of the angels left behind on earth; it held the names of all the withered plants left in Eden. It held the dogs of all the devils and the dozen names for the golden leaves of the Tree of Life. It held _der Keim_ , and Nicklas had read of them a thousand times, but he could read it again if it kept him from thinking on other things.

_Seven sons and seven daughters, and the seven are the same._

_Seven tongues like seven adders, and the seven are to blame._

Nicklas had read of the seed of Memnon a thousand times; he had rewritten the words in his mind so often he thought he might not know their meaning any longer. The seven devils, who snuffed out the world around them like a candle in a jar.

Not seven anymore, Nicklas thought. Five. There were five left, and the second dead had seemed to know him well. Not for nothing; they did not have souls, but it seemed they could still mourn an insurmountable loss. Nicklas would like to think that he would not raise Hell itself to avenge his own brother, but then Kris was alive and well in Gävle, and Nicklas had not been blameless in the shadow of Sasha’s broken body, to say the least.

Five left, and Nicklas did not know when they would know that they had lost another. Five children with a father who had forsaken them; five brothers and five sisters in five bodies, extending their talons over the souls of the earth like an eagle reaching for a hare.

Nicklas flipped idly through the pages, his back settling and sinking against the wood of the wall behind the low headboard. Sasha had stomped back upstairs at some unknowable moment, and Nicklas could hear him gathering firewood, gathering himself for bed. He put the book on the nightstand and went out into the main room.

“Nicky,” Sasha said, turning. “Thought you sleep.”

“No, I was just reading,” Nicklas said. He paused at the chair, his hand coming to rest on the smooth arch of its back. He could see the pool of blankets at Sasha’s feet, the logs in the hearth, and he did not know why it stuck in his chest, but it did.

“You find anything good?” Sasha said. He kicked the blankets into the shape of a man, only wide enough for one.

“Not really,” Nicklas said. “The leftover seed of Memnon are going to be spectacularly livid the next time we meet them,” he said, shrugging, and Sasha favored him with a snort and a smile.

Laugh, Nicklas thought suddenly, his heart pressing up against his breastbone out of nowhere, his breath stealing away. Smile, and let it be from me.

Hell, he thought, almost laughing himself. He felt like a clock with cogs missing, like he was at sea in a storm. He was at loose ends; he was becoming too much himself. The boat was sinking, and the water was up to his ankles now, and though he could swim he found he did not want to.

If God did not want Sasha, then Nicklas would want him enough for the both of them.

Nicklas could see the chip of his own doubt moving like a gamepiece, sliding from one end of the board to the to other. Everything that was wrong was wrong still, excepting the smile on Sasha’s face; everything that was right was right still, excepting that one token of censure.

There was nothing to stop him from drowning now.

“You think they be little mad?” Sasha said, his face sly but open, and Nicklas let himself go under.

He would pray tonight, but not for forgiveness, not for this. It should have been harder, but it was not. It should never have come to this, but he could not pretend he was fighting it any longer.

“You don’t have to sleep here,” Nicklas said, and Sasha’s face went still as a dove at the yelp of the hound.

Nicklas's blood felt like lightning in his veins as Sasha forced his mouth into a shape and then abandoned it.

“Nicky,” Sasha said finally, “you say you don’t know,” and Nicklas stepped around the chair to face him.

Sasha’s left hand was pressed to the hearth, his palm flat and steady, but his other was trembling, and Nicklas wanted to settle Sasha’s heart in his hands like a bird. It was so terrifically Sasha, to be speechless when Nicklas could barely make thoughts of his own, when Nicklas could fight for an hour at any dinner to get a word in edgewise. He smiled gently, and Sasha’s face softened until Nicklas could see the flickers of hope dancing in his eyes.

An animal in the shape of a man, Nicklas thought, and a man with all the dreams of a romantic.

“I did,” Nicklas said dryly, “and I was wrong, though I'd ask that you not hold it over me forever.”

“We still in church,” Sasha said, barely a whisper, close enough for Nicklas to kiss, now, pinned between the cold hearth and Nicklas's unsubtle advance.

“Sasha,” he replied, “we could be in Hell and I would not mind,” and Sasha’s lips parted just before Nicklas's reached them.

Sasha was not a small man. He was not a quiet beast, to be handled with soothing touches, but he seemed to need them now. Nicklas felt as though he was holding sunlight, clinging to melting snow. Sasha’s mouth was soft, delicate as quicksilver under Nicklas's kisses, and Nicklas set his hands on Sasha’s cheeks and kissed him with all the force of his surrender.

It was not fire, but it was embers: it did not singe Nicklas's fingers as before, but he could still feel the heat shivering down his spine when Sasha’s tongue brushed over his lips, when Sasha’s hands found his shoulders, the back of his neck.

Sasha made a sweet, aching noise in his throat when Nicklas dropped his lips to his jaw. Nicklas put his hands on Sasha’s chest and made himself look up.

“Come to bed,” he murmured, and Sasha’s heart shuddered under his fingertips like the hoofbeats of a cavalry.

“Nicky,” Sasha said, less reluctant than disbelieving.

“Just to sleep,” Nicklas said, unable to resist the temptation. “Honestly, Sasha, don’t be so crude.”

Laugh for me, Nicklas thought, and oh, he did.

“Gonna be cold, no fire,” Sasha complained. He pushed at Nicklas, herding him toward the bedroom, and Nicklas let himself be moved.

“I’ll do my best to see that you don’t freeze,” he retorted.

Nicklas's back was to the bed when Sasha lay down, his hand drawing idle circles on the book of names as Sasha pulled the blankets over his legs, and he was not prepared for the sight when he turned.

He was beyond controlling his steps, beyond commanding his own limbs. He would pray tonight, and then he would sleep, and the two did not seem so at odds. The floor was cool under his kneecaps when he knelt by the bed, and Sasha’s skin was warm to the touch.

He laced his fingers in Sasha’s and closed his eyes on the whisper of Sasha’s indrawn breath.

 _Forgive me this day my trespasses_ , he prayed, _and give my soul unto you, as I give my sins to you, and wash me of these errors. Let the water of forgiveness spill from the earth and the sky, and let the worthy receive praise, and the damned receive their due._

 _In everything but this_ was not a prayer that God would hear, but Nicklas could not ask for Him to forgive Sasha anymore.

 _Blessed be the Father, and blessed be the martyr_ , Nicklas prayed, _and the man, and the place for each. Blessed be the walls of the church and the men who hide within, and blessed be the priests and the executioners, for they are not so different in the end._

Sasha did not loosen his hand when Nicklas rose; Nicklas managed to kick off his socks and then gave in and climbed under the sheets in his shirt and thin trousers.

There was no way they would be cold: Sasha pressed close was like diving into a hot springs, submerging Nicklas in an incredible warmth. Sasha’s arm was iron-heavy where it lay over Nicklas's ribcage, his chest a furnace against Nicklas's back, and if Nicklas could thank God for him, he would have.

 


	9. The River

Nicklas slept, and dreamed of capture. He was tied, trussed and spitted like a pig for the roasting. His hands were caught, strapped to a wooden post like a witch to the pyre.

There was no one around, no crowd with mouths like caverns, no cries for his flesh or his soul. There was no fire, though there was wood for it. There was a quiet hearth beneath him, waiting for the spark, but it would not flame, for no one was there with flint and stone. There was only Nicklas, alone and bound, hot in the sunlight, cool in the breeze.

Sasha’s hand moved on his chest, a soft brush of skin through the linen of his shirt.

He was bound; he was trapped. Nicklas was on his side with Sasha’s knee on his thigh and both Sasha’s arms around him from behind. He did not need to wake to know he could not move, but he did not suppose he wanted to try, either: Sasha was sweetly, bone-meltingly warm, and Nicklas had nowhere to be this morning.

Sasha’s mouth pressed to his neck, soft and searching, and Nicklas shivered.

He could not have said if Sasha was altogether awake himself, but he was certainly not asleep. His fingertips were dragging in lazy circles over Nicklas's sternum, swooping and diving like birds in springtime, and his lips were wandering up to Nicklas's ear.

“Sasha,” Nicklas whispered. Sasha’s hand stilled briefly, and then he smiled into the curve of Nicklas's neck.

“Morning, Nicky,” he said. “You wake up now?” he asked, and Nicklas had no idea how long he had been lying here, asleep in Sasha’s arms, quiet under his ministrations.

“Yes,” Nicklas said, letting his head tip back until he could reach Sasha’s mouth, and then he came a great deal more awake indeed.

Sasha’s mouth was hot as summer, sweet and unrelenting, and Nicklas, fuck. Nicklas wanted this to go on forever.

Sasha’s left hand tangled in Nicklas's hair, half a cradle and half a shackle, holding him in place as Sasha's tongue teased over Nicklas's lips, as Sasha slipped his right hand under the hem of Nicklas's shirt. He was too hot, sweltering in the ropes of Sasha’s body, a slow, aching burn everywhere Sasha touched him.

Nicklas twisted until he could reach Sasha, until Sasha’s leg came down between his knees, until Sasha’s fingers skirted torturously across his belly and down, oh. _Oh_ , and Sasha’s hand trailed back up to sketch shapes on his chest, to dance at the hollow of his throat, to flick at his nipples, quick bowstring plucks that sent shocks of sensation racing across Nicklas's skin. Fuck, he wanted, and Sasha was only half providing; fuck, but he needed more than this.

Sasha’s tongue left Nicklas's mouth to lave across the skin of his shoulder, and Nicklas groaned and considered turning all the way, rolling them over and doing this himself.

“You want?” Sasha asked, his lips on Nicklas's collarbone, his teeth scraping over the skin, fuck, yes, every glance of pressure a bright spark of want whispering up Nicklas's spine.

What was that? Nicklas thought, trying to recover his mind, trying to excavate something like words. Sasha’s fingers tightened in his hair, his other hand dipping down to the thin skin over Nicklas's hip, and _yes_ , yes, the answer was clearly, inarguably yes: yes to everything; yes to the press of Sasha’s leg over his thigh, pinning him there; yes to Sasha’s palm brushing over the hair at the base of his cock, to the rough pads of his fingers dragging up the length of it like fire, like lightning, like, oh, _oh_.

“Yes,” Nicklas gasped. “Sasha, please.”

Sasha’s breath gusted over Nicklas's chest on a growl, his hips pushing suddenly against Nicklas, and Nicklas had a moment to parse the sensation of Sasha’s cock grinding hard into the side of his hip before Sasha’s fingers wrapped around his own and he stopped parsing anything.

Fuck, Sasha’s hand was so much more than Nicklas remembered from his misspent youth, so much better than his own. He was stroking Nicklas glacially slow, stopping just before his thumb reached the head of Nicklas's cock, just far enough to make Nicklas's back arch and his stomach turn to liquid heat. Nicklas's shirt was pushed up nearly to his throat; Nicklas's mouth was open, and he was not dignifying himself.

Sasha’s mouth was on Nicklas's neck again, then his jaw, and Nicklas rocked his hips into Sasha’s grip and turned his face to meet Sasha’s lips and begged with everything but words.

Sasha’s hand sped up; his hips found a rhythm against Nicklas's buttock, erratic and desperate, too much to think about in the overwhelming onslaught of sensation. Sasha’s fingers twisted over the head of Nicklas's cock, oh fuck, rubbing quick circles through the slick, and Nicklas moaned and flung his arm over his shoulder to catch a fistful of Sasha’s hair and hold him there, hold him there and make him, oh, please, make him never fucking stop.

“Nicky,” Sasha snarled, his hips fucking steadily against Nicklas and his hand flying over Nicklas's cock. He had Nicklas's leg under his knee and Nicklas's hand clenching in his hair. His palm slipped across the head of Nicklas's cock, hard white-hot pressure and, oh, fucking Hell, Nicklas was on the brink of coming, on the cliff-edge, suspended in the air, a hair’s breadth from pleading, oh fuck, Sasha, please, just _let him_.

He did it again and Nicklas twisted in his arms, shaking; he did it again and a sob caught in Nicklas's throat, betraying him. “Ah,” Nicklas whimpered, “please, please, _Sasha_ ,” and Sasha’s tongue thrust into his mouth and his hips shoved hard against Nicklas and stayed, his cock jerking, as his body broke over Nicklas in waves.

Oh, Nicklas thought. Oh, fuck.

Sasha’s hand only paused for a moment and then he was moving again, wiping Nicklas's mind blank as he kissed him, as his mouth and his hands and the endless heat of his body drove Nicklas off the edge, into the long terrifying drop.

“Yes,” Nicklas choked out, “yes, ah, _fuck_ ,” and then there was only Sasha, everywhere, stripping endless bursts of pleasure out of him, holding him as he came and then came down from it.

He let himself drift like flotsam, lazy in the ocean of his contentment; Sasha’s arms were still around him. He relaxed his fingers from Sasha’s hair and let his elbow drop back to the bed. He had his own come on his belly and Sasha still draped over his side. The skin of his collarbone was stinging gently in reminder of Sasha’s teeth.

He might sleep again, he thought as Sasha’s lips laid the ghost of kiss on his cheek.

—

He woke to the sound of birds fighting in the trees outside his window and an empty bed; the blankets were piled on his legs and his shirt was gone.

“Sasha?” he called.

He did not have Sasha’s ears, but even Nicklas could hear him clamber up from the cellar and across the church floor. He did not have Sasha’s nose, but even Nicklas could smell the loam of the earth that clung to Sasha as he pushed open the door to the little room.

“You awake now?” Sasha asked, padding to the side of the bed, and Nicklas sat up and stretched his arms over his head.

“I was awake the last time,” he said. “It just didn’t take. What have you been up to?”

Sasha had been up to something: his fingers were dark with dirt, but his clothes were clean. He had his shoes on, which was a relatively rare sight, and his beard was coming back as thick stubble, which was as common as the sunrise.

“I’m work in cellar, go into town, get note from letter-keeper,” he said pleasantly as he sat down at Nicklas's hip, and Nicklas's mind swam with visions of utter avian catastrophe.

“You did not,” Nicklas said, appalled. The letter-keeper would have shot him, not that it would have done anything. He would have run Sasha out of town for getting within shouting distance of his beloved pigeons.

“No,” Sasha chuckled. “I’m send someone to get, don’t worry about bird. But you should see,” he continued, pulling a small piece of paper from the waistband of his trousers and handing it over. It sprang open in Nicklas's fingers: it had been read a few times already.

Sasha was quiet as Nicklas unrolled it completely, sitting like a statue in the sunbeam from the window. Nicklas shifted closer to him, until his thigh was just touching Sasha’s back.

 _Yes Kashdar forest dying_ , it read. _Dalsis if you say so. Kashdar priest still here, no change. Hello, Alex._

“What?” Nicklas said. What on earth? The forest he would believe, but they had slain the seed into its many parts, shattered it into sand, and he did not think they could reassemble themselves. He sorely hoped not.

“Five seed left,” Sasha said solemnly.

That was one way of explaining things, but Nicklas did not like it very much.

“You think, what?” Nicklas said. “They’re all up here for this?” Sasha shrugged, the planes of his back rocking softly against Nicklas's leg.

“Gava-kava have something they want,” Sasha said. “Maybe all want.”

“How many souls does she have to have for them all to come and find her?” Nicklas asked. It was a terrible thought, the five mouths and five awful voices all together, all five whispering to each other, all five hunting a spirit for the sake of Hell, tracking her like serpents after a rat.

“Lot,” Sasha answered, his voice a heavy mirror to Nicklas's thoughts. “You come see what I find in cellar, though.”

He turned his head to look Nicklas in the eye, the crooked angle of his nose in sharp relief, and Nicklas leaned forward and kissed him.

Perhaps the seed were walking the earth like a clutch of beetles, waiting to devour the clean wood of poor lost human souls. Perhaps the trees were rioting and rotting away from here to Moscow. Perhaps there was poison in the earth, and perhaps they were both damned, now, but Nicklas would take what he was given, and the plush sweetness of Sasha’s lips was a gift he would not return.

“All right,” Nicklas said. Sasha’s eyes opened again, blue like ice, blue like fire. He brushed his mouth back over Nicklas's on a sigh.

“Come with,” Sasha said, standing up, and Nicklas tossed the blankets away to follow him.

—

Nicklas's bare feet were silent on the rungs leading down to the cellar, soft like the padding steps of the timid rabbits in the bushes surrounding the church, steady and quiet. Grit and dust stuck to the pads of his fingers, and this would be the end of this shirt if he was not careful.

There was a great hole in the far wall, a gaping, angry mouth with a gullet so deep Nicklas could not squint to see the end. Roots hung from its ceiling like chandeliers in the heavy gloom, dropping trails of loam where light should shine.

“Sasha,” he said. “What did you do?”

“I’m not do anything,” Sasha said, sounding affronted despite the absurdity of the protest, and Nicklas turned to face him.

“You have dug us a pit from here to Hell itself,” Nicklas said. “Did you do that with your _hands_?”

Sasha was strong enough to pull a wagon and big enough to carry and ox, but his hands were not quite so large as shovel-heads, and Nicklas could not imagine the effort to burrow a tunnel of this size. He walked to the edge of the room and peered in, but no light was forthcoming: he would need a torch at the least, although he was not in any haste to venture into the crevasse, as it was.

“No,” Sasha said, derisive. “Where you think all dirt go, if I’m dig?”

All over you, Nicklas wanted to retort, but Sasha had a very good point, and there was not nearly enough earth in the heaps surrounding them to account for the hollow in the wall. The ground of the cellar was piled with rocks and the thick black dirt of the foundation, but Nicklas could not have built even a full garden from it; it only came to his ankles at the highest, and it spread over half the room at most.

“Was this already here?” Nicklas asked, looking into the corridor with more interest than trepidation, now.

“Dalsi make it,” Sasha said. “I’m go in for half mile, maybe, and there’s water, Nicky.” He stepped up until his shoulder was brushing Nicklas's. Nicklas's eyes were better adjusting to the dimness the longer he stared, and where it had seemed all rough soil and broken rocks, he could see that the walls were smooth and packed-down, fashioned by some other hand. Fashioned by the hand of sticks and roots, Nicklas thought. This was madness, but it was a beautiful sort of thing, too, wherever it went.

“You found water?” Nicklas asked. “In the earth?” Sasha shook his head.

“Water in river, run underground,” he said. “River like dalsi smell, in Hol.”

Nicklas did not know what he would have done without Sasha’s nose, or Sasha’s eyes or his ears. He did not know what he would have done without any of Sasha, these long years together.

“Where do you think it goes?“ Nicklas said, though he had an idea himself.

“Kashdar,” Sasha said. “Only thing make sense. Why else they dig tunnel there?”

It was a good question. Nicklas did not pretend to understand the thoughts of a stand of dead trees, but he could not think why they would trouble themselves to carve out a path into the earth. They must have known the river was there, to find it from the confines of the tiny cellar, and they must have known it well. Perhaps dalsis could smell it, or muster some sense unknown to man in the roots of their toes; it did not seem foolish to imagine they might know where water was, if they were looking.

When he broke out of his thoughts, Sasha was watching him with an expression of amused patience, and he blinked and tried not to feel patronized by the smirk on Sasha’s face.

“Can dalsis swim?” Nicklas asked. They could have had a boat, he thought, but that seemed too complex for a tree, and it would take too long besides: they had come upon the church in a fury, and Nicklas did not think they had the wherewithal to fashion themselves a dinghy in the wildness of their exit.

“Don’t need to. Stick float,” Sasha said, his voice dry as tinder, and Nicklas threw his head back and groaned.

God help them both, he thought, but it was too late for Sasha, and God was of questionable investment in the matter of Nicklas anymore.

Nicklas pressed his lips together and set it aside, like a ring in a box. He could look at the band and wonder if it was tarnished later; he did not think it would help him much to reflect on God now.

“Well,” Nicklas said finally, “what do you want to do? Go after them?” They could acquire a boat of some kind, Nicklas supposed, although he could not say from where; Gardavet was a hundred miles from the nearest port. They could hire someone to build one, which would take only a month and cost all the money they had, never mind trying to convince someone to do it. Never mind getting it down here, Nicklas thought, frowning.

“We should follow, I think,” Sasha said. “I’m smell them right to river edge, and they drag on wall to north for a bit.” He shrugged. “Maybe make raft?” he suggested. Nicklas shot him a look of intense skepticism.

“Make a raft,” he repeated. He would need his shoes for that, and a great deal of a rope, some nails, and the loss of his remaining sanity. “Make a raft out of what exactly?”

“Is church,” Sasha shrugged. “All kind of wood,” he add, smile growing like a weed on his face, and Nicklas turned his face away in disbelief.

“We are not making a raft out of the cross,” he said sharply. The black maw looked no more inviting than a moment ago, but he thought they could fit a raft big enough to carry two through it.

He was going mad.

Sasha chuckled. “I’m thinking table, maybe,” he said. “Or pews, but we do go after dalsis to save soul,” he blinked at Nicklas in his peripheral vision, all innocence, “so I’m think God forgive us if we take what we need.”

Nicklas steeled himself against dignifying any of it; he was not giving in to the joke, though he had to bite his cheek to force his traitor lips to still.

“I think we’ll leave the cross for last,” Nicklas said, “just in case,” and Sasha nudged him in the side and turned for the ladder.

—

They did not need the cross, or not for that, not that Nicklas was much judge of what they might need. He had not been on water in anything less than a steam-ship in years, which Sasha well knew. There was enough wood in the broken table and the desk in Nicklas's room to satisfy Sasha, in any case.

Nicklas gave up pretending aid when Sasha started in on destruction; Nicklas was a fair hand with a saw, but his fingers were better-suited for mending than gouging. Sasha could split the trunk of a tree with a frown and a shrug: he did not need the help.

“Outside, please,” Nicklas told him, so Sasha dragged his massacre into the yard as Nicklas collected the remnants of their things to patch and fold. If they were to float to Kashdar in the bowels of the earth on the broken bones of a church, they would need warm clothes, and possibly more food.

The hearth was cold at Nicklas's feet; the smooth floorboards were worn but clean. The cross hung empty on the altar, eternal in its watch, the fate of God waiting for Him in His house.

 _Our Father who art in Heaven_ , Nicklas thought, his hands stopped in their work, his needle finding rest between stitches.

Their Father who was in Heaven, and who would stay there until the very end of the world. Their Father who waited without breath for that final day; their Father who would descend the steps of the sky and walk amongst His children to choose the righteous. Their Father, who would climb the cross, take the nails and seep His blood into the earth to let the gardens of Eden grow again.

 _Thou bringeth to the earth thy glory_ , Nicklas thought, and He would, one day.

One day He would walk beside them all, His face a mask of judgment, but until then, there was forgiveness.

 _Forgive me this day my trespasses_ , Nicklas prayed, turning his face toward his hands. The cross was waiting, but not for him. God would forgive him anything he asked; God would mend his soul like the linen in his lap, if he laid it at His feet.

Outside, Sasha was working, cutting wood in the midday sunshine. Outside, Sasha was toiling for the sake of a human soul, and Nicklas could ask for some things, but he could not ask for that.

 _Forgive me_ , Nicklas prayed, _and give my soul unto you, as I give my sins to you, and wash me of these errors. Forgive me my pride; forgive me my fears and shelter me in faith._

“Nicky? Come out here for minute,” Sasha said, opening the door to the yard. His hair was sticking to the skin of his forehead, sweat shining on his brow like quartz on the hillsides, and Nicklas felt a whisper of anger curl within him. It was like smoke, like the shimmer of heat in the distance.

Forgive me, Nicklas thought as he stood, for doubting that You would love him, and forgive me my faith in You, if You do not.

—

The yard was ruined. Nicklas thought the trees might be weeping, to see this.

“What on earth have you done?” he asked, though he could guess: there was a pile of slats and planks roughly the size of a small ox in the center of the mess, and he supposed they would be carrying that into the cellar shortly.

Sasha sent him a look of great forbearance that Nicklas did not entirely deserve. Nicklas smiled at him.

“I’m go into town for rope, I think,” Sasha said after a moment. “Food, too, in case we on the river long time.”

The river might go anywhere, in truth, and that was wise. “Do you want company?” Nicklas asked. Their things could wait until tomorrow, if they had to.

Sasha shrugged. “You want come?” he said.

“Not especially,” Nicklas replied blandly.

Sasha’s answering smile was light as the sun; his hands were warm as the breeze where they rose to touch Nicklas's cheeks. There was a rejoinder on his tongue, and Nicklas could see it: he could see the tart glee of Sasha’s lips, and he leaned forward and kissed him instead of suffering the indignity.

The intake of Sasha’s breath sounded like surprise. The shiver of his skin felt like shock, but it was gone in a second, washed away in the building fervor of his mouth, his hands as they drew Nicklas to him. Nicklas opened his mouth and let him in, let him take what he wanted, and Sasha groaned, rumbling up out of his chest like the eaves in a storm.

“Nicky,” Sasha said, a cold wire of uncertainty still twisting through his voice, so Nicklas threaded his fingers in Sasha’s hair and dropped his mouth and bit him.

It was only a nip, not even enough to bruise his chin; Sasha yelped like it was a mortal wound.

Nicklas was distantly, logically aware that Sasha could lift him, if needed: he was not so heavy as all that, and Sasha, after all, was Sasha. It was only surprising it had not happened sooner, he thought as his feet left the ground.

Sasha’s hands were on his thighs, Nicklas's knees by his hips. Nicklas tucked his heels around his waist and kicked him, and Sasha ran his hip into the doorframe.

“Ow,” Nicklas complained. Sasha was still kissing him, his lips trailing down Nicklas's neck like lustful wingbeats, soft brushes that sent gusts of heat blowing through him.

“Sorry,” Sasha told him, sugar-sweet and insincere.

Sasha was a liar, but Nicklas was not sorry, either, not for the strength of Sasha’s shoulder blades under his palms, not for the agility of his footsteps or the unceremonious drop from his arms to the bedcovers. It was only Sasha as he always was, and Nicklas could not be sorry for that.

“Going into town, were you?” Nicklas laughed, and Sasha stopped in his efforts to kiss him and put a pillow over his face.

It was only Sasha, as he always was, and Sasha was ticklish and badly coordinated when he was laughing. Nicklas had his breath back and his face free in seconds and his knees on either side of Sasha’s hips in half a minute, and then Sasha’s eyes met his and the laughter flew from his throat.

Sasha’s lips were pink as dogwood flowers; his eyes were clear as the morning sky.

He blinked, slow and uncertain, as Nicklas drew his knuckle over the stubble of his jaw, a river’s course to the point of his chin, a waterfall down the slope of his neck to rest in the hollow between his collarbones. His chest was barely moving under the faint pressure of Nicklas's hand, and Nicklas thought he might be holding his breath.

He was beautiful, the proud face of a statue and the questioning gaze of a man in one, an animal and a king sharing one body, one soul. Nicklas would never be sorry for him, but he found he was not a little lost in his gratitude.

“Alexander Mikhailovich Ovechkin,” he said, helpless with the spark of thankfulness, of joy, and Sasha’s eyes flew open. “Of course I want you.”

Of course he wanted to bend down and kiss the look off Sasha’s face; of course he wanted to cradle Sasha’s skull in his hands, Sasha’s body in his arms, Sasha’s hips between his thighs, twisting underneath him. Of course he wanted; fuck, he wanted.

“Nicky,” Sasha murmured, aimless, his mouth tracing fire over Nicklas's hand, his wrist, oh, Hell. Nicklas rolled his hips against Sasha’s and felt him shiver. Good.

Sasha permitted Nicklas to divest him of his shirt, allowed him to lay his mouth to Sasha’s chest, to the curve of his ribs and the soft skin of his belly before Nicklas's fingers found his trousers and Sasha lurched up onto his elbows.

“Nicky,” he said, not directionless now, a shock and a warning together, and Nicklas thought that Sasha was more the fool between them, if he thought he could warn Nicklas off him with nothing but a tone.

Nicklas had been young, once. Nicklas had been almost a man, his hands already gathering scars from the smithy, and though women were easier, simpler, allowed, though he had not done more than kiss a man, he had had a great deal more than that done to him.

Sasha did not warn him again, not when he dragged his thumb down the hard jut of Sasha’s cock; not when he kissed the skin of his hip, deceptively fragile where it laid thin over the bone.

Sasha’s head fell back when Nicklas took his cock into his mouth, and his hands clenched white in the sheets.

“ _Fuck_ , Nicky,” he gasped, and Nicklas could feel the snarl in his lungs from here.

Oh, Nicklas thought, as Sasha’s stomach jumped, his cock thick and blood-hot in Nicklas's mouth. It was overwhelming and familiar at once, the smell, the sensation, the drenching, shuddering heat pouring off Sasha’s body. Nicklas's heart was pounding, his hands tight on Sasha’s hips, and fuck, he was hard.

They both were: they were both of them shaking with each slow slide of Sasha’s cock, with every broken sound that fell from Sasha’s lips, with every stifled moan that died in Nicklas's throat.

“Blyat, fuck! _Please_ , please, I’m,” Sasha growled, and Nicklas pulled his head back in time to watch Sasha’s claws sink into the mattress.

They were both of them afire, but only Sasha had half-melted into another shape.

He was wild under Nicklas's hands, more and less human all at once, gorgeous in the shape of him. Nicklas could not breathe for the sight, for the feel of Sasha’s body twisting as he fucked upward into Nicklas's hand.

Nicklas caught a flash of silver when he pressed his lips to Sasha’s, but then Sasha’s eyes closed and his body broke under Nicklas's, curling up around him as he came. Nicklas could feel the tips of Sasha’s claws through the thin fabric of his shirt; he could see the gleam of Sasha's teeth as his mouth fell open, panting.

He did not look inclined to see to Nicklas, and Nicklas was not inclined to wait. He had his trousers undone and his hand on himself before Sasha’s eyes opened, all of his desperation tearing through him at once, every helpless groan from Sasha’s lips echoing in his ears. His fingers were slick with Sasha’s come, sliding tight around his cock; fuck, he was close.

Sasha made a soft, hurt noise when Nicklas came, his hands moving to catch his shoulders as he shook apart, lowering Nicklas to the bed beside him.

There were bits of cotton floating in the air like dandelion fluff when Nicklas opened his eyes, fairies in the afternoon sunlight.

What on earth, he wondered lazily. They were landing in slow concert, like snowflakes lost in the summertime.

Oh, he thought, blinking as he tracked the drowsy fall of an especially adventurous puff of white. The mattress.

Sasha’s hand was lying lax at Nicklas's hip, and he looked over when Nicklas picked it up to look at it.

“Hm?” Sasha said, flexing his fingers. His eyes were still mostly silver, shining like brooches. His fingertips were still claws, no fingernail, just a long silver curve arcing out from his first knuckle.

“I think we’re sleeping in front of the fire tonight,” Nicklas said, thumping his foot into the bed. A flurry of new dancers burst up into the air and began their steady drift back down. “Nicely done, I guess.”

Sasha was silent, his fingers suddenly stiff in Nicklas's grasp, so Nicklas kissed the length of his thumb, the warm muscle and the cool elegance of the claw.

It was only Sasha, as he always was.

“You know I don’t mind,” Nicklas told him. He turned to face him, turned to kiss him, turned and pressed his lips to Sasha’s mouth until the line between his brows was smooth again. “Are you still going into town?”

“Maybe should stay and clean,” Sasha said wryly, finding the corner of the sheet and offering it. Nicklas wiped his hand off and made half an effort to clean himself; he could put it with the rest of the wrecked linens.

“No, I’ll do it,” Nicklas said. “Go ahead. Do you want everything in the yard moved down into the cellar?”

“Might as well, you want to start,” Sasha said. “Where you put my shirt, Nicky?” he grumbled, rolling over, and Nicklas kissed his cheek and stood.

“Hell if I know,” he said. “Don’t go into town with that face on, Sasha,” he added, because Sasha’s claws were near gone already but his eyes were the very definition of inhuman, and Nicklas did not think the townspeople would like to see him smile.

“What face?” Sasha said, grinning until Nicklas could see the sharp tips of what had once been only innocent molars.

“God speed you, then,” Nicklas said, and went to start on the laundry.


	10. The Mermaid

It took less time to finish the mending and wash what was left of their clothing than it did to haul the splintered boards into the cellar, but even that was not too great a task, and Nicklas was nearly done when Sasha returned. He did not call out, and Nicklas did not shout to show him where he was; his footsteps on the dirt of the tunnel would be enough to catch Sasha’s ear.

Ten feet into the crumbling hole, it was darker than pitch and thick with the smell of earth, sticking to the planks as Nicklas hauled them into the darkness and left them.

He could not see the edge of the river, but he could hear it, a waiting rush, the breath of the earth, the blood in its veins.

“See in the dark now?” Sasha’s voice came, teasing, as Nicklas dropped the last of the wood in its new home.

“Even you can’t see in this,” Nicklas said, for the sake of argument. He thought it might not be true; Sasha could see the moon through the clouds in midwinter, and Nicklas had never truly tested the limits of his eyes.

“I’m see fine,” Sasha said. “I’m also bring lantern, keep you from fall off raft and drown,” and Nicklas pretended he could see the glitter of Sasha’s teeth in the darkness.

“How thoughtful of you,” Nicklas said. From the cool wall of blackness, a hand gripped his elbow and led him forward, deeper.

He dusted his hands on his trousers and followed, ten more feet, and then perhaps twenty, and the whisper of the river became a murmur, a rumble of waves on the moist walls of the cavern, until he could feel it in the icy droplets that gusted against the backs of his hands.

He blinked, but he could not see. There was only Sasha’s hand on his arm and the sense of space, the movement of the air on his face that said it was open, that it was wide enough to swallow him whole.

“How far is it to Kashdar, by boat?” Nicklas asked. The river made him loud despite himself. Would they sleep on the raft, he wondered, and cling to each other for fear of falling, of going under?

He had gone under already. He had fallen in, once.

The sickening memory of drowning lurched into his consciousness like a horse broken free, kicking through, until all he could feel was cold, cold water and desperation, the horror of the current, the sickness of dying.

“Maybe two, three day,” Sasha said, oblivious.

“I dreamed of this,” Nicklas said. “I dreamed of drowning in this river, I think.” Sasha’s hand flinched, his fingers tight on Nicklas's arm.

“You want stay, Nicky,” he started warily, and Nicklas shook his head.

“After the dalsis,” he said. “In Hol. I think,” he struggled to catch the images; were they broken bones, or broken stems? Were they oozing sap, or blood? “I think it was a memory,” he finished, though he could not say whose it was.

“They die down here?” Sasha said, less worried than curious now.

“Somebody did,” Nicklas said. “Not me, though.” He was not his mother, and if he had dreamed with the mind of a tree, it was only the once. Nicklas would stumble back to the cellar with Sasha’s pack and leave him there to build them a raft: he was no use in the dark.

—

They had more left to their possessions than Nicklas had thought, and between Sasha’s shopping and the spoils of the church, there was enough to last them far past Kashdar, if that was where they were going. They could make it to the sea on this, Nicklas thought, not that he wanted to be swept out into the ship lanes and die halfway to Scotland.

Sasha had only ruined Nicklas's bed, not his own, so Nicklas folded their blankets in front of the empty hearth and sat down to read until he had better company.

The cross was empty and pale, warm and waiting. Nicklas found his Bible; God would be companion enough.

Sasha was a long time at his work, and Nicklas blinked his eyes open as Sasha came up the ladder.

“You don’t want wait to read me stories?” Sasha teased, pulling off his boots. Nicklas folded the pages shut and dropped his shirt on the floor beside him. He was missing a button on the collar that he had not had time to repair; he would look like a charlatan if he could not find a replacement.

“You don’t pray tonight?” Sasha asked idly. Nicklas looked over to see Sasha’s eyes trailing down to his chest, halting on the five dark scabs dotting his skin, the five fingers of the devil.

They were healing well, Nicklas thought, but by his frown Sasha did not seem to wholly agree.

“No,” Nicklas said. “I did this morning, and I haven’t done enough else today to beg penance for,” he added, smiling, and Sasha’s eyes found his, clear sky and livid silver.

“No?” he said, but it was not a question. It was remonstration, but Nicklas would not have it.

His soul was his own, and his God was his own, too. He could decide who was right, between them. He would not ask forgiveness for what he had freely chosen; he would not bow his head and wash himself of the wolf.

How quickly the heart changes in the face of censure, he thought, from shame to fury. _For the honest man will know no sanction for his words in the eyes of God_ , but there was more than one kind of truth.

Nicklas reached out and caught the rosary in his finger, and Sasha looked down, his brows still drawn and furrowed.

“And you?” Nicklas said. “Are you going to pray?” He dropped it against his skin, the beads small and lonely in their sparse company, huddled at the end of their string.

“No,” Sasha snapped, harsh and short.

Nicklas had thought him angry before, but it was nothing to this. His eyes were blue fire, wet with rage; his hands were in fists on the blankets.

“Sasha?” Nicklas said.

“If your God listen me before,” Sasha said, low and vicious, “don’t think He listen now.”

No, Nicklas wanted to say, but it was a lie.

_And the Lord hears all men who come to Him in good faith, with open heart and penitent mind_ , but that was neither of them, tonight.

“Sleep, Nicky,” Sasha said, laying down and folding the blanket over himself, and Nicklas had no choice but to follow.

—

The raft was larger than Nicklas had thought it would be, floating tethered in the gloom. It was barely lit by the lantern in his hand, and the light could not reach the far wall, could barely illuminate the bank where he stood, its flickering touch brushing up against the rocks that piled at his feet.

_Our Father who art in Heaven_ , Nicklas prayed, bowing his head, as Sasha came to a stop in the tunnel behind him. _Bless this journey, and the enterprise that guides us; bless the wood of the earth, made by His hand, and the river that carries us._

God had listened to him before, and Nicklas would take his chances on Him hearing now.

The raft rocked alarmingly when Nicklas set his satchel on the boards, but Sasha’s construction was sound, and he settled the lantern between them as Sasha untied the line and gently sent them out.

The mouth of the tunnel was gone in an instant, vanished in the blackness, and Nicklas's breath went cold.

He was not afraid of the dark, and he could swim; he could swim, but not in this. The river was carrying them fast, or perhaps it was not: he could not see. He could not comprehend their speed, staring out into the ink-dark void. He could feel the air against his cheeks, and the rare splash of water that crested the edge of the raft, and he could see their legs, crossed side-by-side in the lantern light. He could see the proud line of Sasha’s profile cast on the curtain of endless night, laid upon nothing but black.

He was not afraid, but if he moved too far, if he fell, he would die. If there was anything here, he would never know it.

Sasha had not said anything beyond the necessary that morning, but Nicklas was not too proud to stand on the bitterness of argument; he reached past the lantern and took Sasha’s hand.

Sasha’s fingers threaded through his, and then their hands landed on the wood of the raft. “We fine,” Sasha said, quiet under the rumble of the water.

They sat in silence for long enough that Nicklas's legs began to ache, and when he shifted to stretch them out, Sasha opened his mouth and then closed it again.

“Yes?” Nicklas said.

“Five seed come for one soul?” Sasha said after a pause.

“That’s not what you were going to say,” Nicklas retorted, “but you’re right, that seems absurd. She could have more souls than the baby, I suppose.”

“Where?” Sasha said, thoroughly ignoring Nicklas's aspersions. “She don’t have much to her. Tiny thing.”

“What do they make their new children out of? String and rocks?” Nicklas mused. He was growing used to the steady rock of the raft under them, used to the dark emptiness that surrounded them. “She could be keeping more in the cloak, or in her clothing.”

“Hm,” Sasha said, and fell quiet again.

Nicklas tapped his thumb against the bones of Sasha’s hand. “What else?”

“Nothing,” Sasha said, and then, “you know.”

“Do I?” Nicklas said.

“Not too late to say God you sorry,” Sasha said, turning to meet his eyes, and Nicklas felt his heart stumble like a horse on a trail.

It was never too late for forgiveness, Nicklas thought, but it was too late for him to ask; he could not kneel and wash himself of what was not a stain. He would not absolve himself of this.

“It’s not necessarily a sin,” Nicklas said, and Sasha sent him a truly disbelieving look.

“We married now?” he said, steeped in sarcasm. “No. You think He love me, just because you want me now? He like me _less_ , I think,” he spat, and while Nicklas did not think it was a competition, he could not deny the fundamental sentiment.

“He should learn, then,” Nicklas said, blasphemy enough for excommunication.

The way of God was the path in the darkness, the ineffable, the incontrovertible, and it was not for man to choose.

The way of God was the footstep on the surface of the sea, the unchangeable Will, but Nicklas had seen it change. The word of God was absolute, but he had seen his mother whisper to the wood of the cross, and he had seen dead men walk.

“You always say,” Sasha replied. “Nothing change.”

He was not his mother, and God might not be listening to him now, but he knew that sometimes, things changed.

Sasha was an abomination in the eyes of God, no creation of His grace, and He did not give such things His blessing, though they may ask. He never had before, and Nicklas had seen it; he could not curse the devil and not the dog, and he could not bless the sinner with the saint.

“I don’t know,” Nicklas said finally. Sasha’s fingers were heavy and warm, and Nicklas would not know just for wondering, but God did not answer those sorts of prayers.

—

They had been floating forever, Nicklas thought. They had been floating through hours, through brief meals and awkward naps, through blackness, only endless blackness.

“I’m going to sleep again,” Nicklas said, laying down. There was nothing better to do, and he did not know how they would know if they got where they were going at all; they could float until they died, with no shore to land on.

“Nicky,” Sasha said, tugging on his hand, “look.”

Nicklas could not tell distance; he could not tell pace nor time, but he could see, somewhere in the darkness, a feeble blue glow.

“It’s on bank,” Sasha said, and proceeded to let Nicklas go and plunge his leg into the water.

For a terrible, nauseating moment, Nicklas thought he mean to swim for it, but he only steered them to the left, a steady arc that landed them against the wall and then, after an aborted bounce, into a small divot in the bank.

It was a cove, almost, fifteen feet wide and sloping gently to the water. There were boards at the front of it, lined up like the wall of a house.

“Does something live here?” Nicklas said, as Sasha carefully guided them to the shore and tied the raft to a rock. From this distance, he could see that the soft, phosphorescent glow was peeking out from a broken slat, and Nicklas did not feel all that confident that they were welcome.

“Must be,” Sasha said, clambering off the raft.

There was a door, in a way: the boards were flotsam, dry wreckage of trees and ships, and one was hinged such that it swung when Nicklas gave it a gentle push.

It was fifteen feet wide inside and half water, a great, calm pool in the center of the floor that went down so deep Nicklas did not think he could have seen the bottom even in the daylight; perhaps it was one with the river. The air was cool, hardly moving between the slats of the wall and the smooth curve of rock that made up the back of the cove. Something lived here, something that had set the seaweed on the floor in the far corner, something that had let soft blue moss grow from the stone ceiling like a ghost’s chandelier.

Nicklas looked up, and then down, and then stopped entirely. Sasha was a step behind him, and in the moment before they both set foot inside, there was a face in the water.

“Anybody home?” Sasha said, nudging Nicklas out of the way. Nicklas caught his wrist.

“Something was,” he said. “It just went under.”

It had had eyes, and a nose, and a mouth, but he could not say beyond that very nonspecific identity, and quite a lot of things could lay claim to those attributes. They waited a minute, and then another, but it did not return.

“Maybe it don’t like me,” Sasha said.

“That’s fine,” Nicklas said, and then Sasha took a step back, out the door.

“It’s all right, Nicky,” Sasha said sweetly, “everything like you,” and the door was shut before Nicklas could protest.

The face did not leap from the water to seize him, so Nicklas reached up and touched the blue moss instead, hanging like beard lichen in clumps. It was dry, but it did not crumble; it seemed to live on air and the rock it clung to.

“Hello,” a voice said from beside him.

It was more than a face: it raised its head out of the water to its shoulders and showed itself a woman, pale as a fish’s belly with pupilless white eyes, her sallow hair plastered to her neck and arms.

Nicklas took a step back from the edge of the pool. “Hello,” he said.

“I heard you talking,” she said conversationally, “all the way down the water, a _mile_ away. You humans are so loud. Well, humans,” she said, wrinkling her nose, “humans and _other_ things with legs. You look like a gentleman,” she floated out to the center of the pool, “but I don’t know why anyone would like to keep such company.”

Nicklas's mouth was open before he could think of a response. She drifted forward again, until her arms were propped up on the stone, and said, “Well, it is all right, if you only want to visit.”

He was not one for idle chatter, but she did not seem to need his help. “Thank you,” he said. “We won’t stay long.”

“I don’t mean to be rude,” she said. Her eyelashes were as pale as the rest of her, invisible as she blinked up at him. “Are you traveling far?”

“A little ways,” he replied. “Following something, hopefully not too far.”

“Oh,” she said, her teeth short and curved behind her smile, “you must be after the soul-stealer, everyone is.”

“Did you see the dalsis go by?” he asked, curious despite himself. No one gave up something for nothing, but Sasha was just outside, and Nicklas could carry on here a little longer.

“Anyone would have,” she said, “they are louder than you, even, and all rolled up into a mess of branches and things. I do wonder why they won’t swim, when swimming is faster, but nothing likes to swim, it seems.” She looked up at him, then launched herself backward and over to the left, where there was a smooth patch of stone beside the pool. “Do you like to swim?” she asked.

“Somewhat,” Nicklas said, as noncommittally as he could manage.

“I like you better than anything, then,” she said, “and better than those dalsis, anyway.”

“Thank you,” Nicklas said. “I don’t much like them either.”

“Of course you don’t,” she said. “Who would? They are only ugly, dead things. Still, you have to feel sorry for them, their souls all pulled out like worms.” She hoisted herself up onto the edge of the pool, spilling water everywhere. “Well, not their souls, but theirs after a way. The souls of all those dead fellows from the river.”

Her tail shone with an iridescent green and gold pattern in the low light from the fungus. It lay thick and serpentine on the stone floor of the hut, snaking into the water at the very tip. Her skin was whiter than linen, white like birch-bark, white like the inside of an eggshell, and her hair had almost no color itself, just a tinge of blonde and green where it fell over her shoulders.

“I’m afraid I don’t know exactly what happened to those men,” Nicklas said. He felt he should sit, but there were no chairs, and he was not all that excited about sitting on the ground beside her.

“Oh, they drowned, it was _such_ a thing,” she said, leaning forward. If there had been tea and black toast, Nicklas would have been home in Gävle, entertaining the ladies of the church.

Nicklas must have frowned, because she carried on.

“There was a boat, you might have heard,” she said. “It was sailing, and then there was a mutiny, every man against the other,” she told him. She talked with her hands, and Nicklas was charmed despite himself. Did she do that underwater, he wondered?

“That sounds horrible,” he said, recognizing his cue. She flipped a piece of hair off her alabaster shoulder and spread her fingers wide.

“Yes, it was awful,” she said. “They were all in the water, thrashing around, oh, they made a monstrous racket. You would never believe it. Almost a hundred men, all sank to the bottom of the river and gave up the ghost, as you like to say.”

“When was this?” Nicklas asked. He had not been in Gordavet all that long, but that sort of news would travel.

“Oh, about two hundred years ago,” she said blithely. “Their souls went up to the surface like dead fish do. It was beautiful,” she added, “in its way.”

“I imagine it must have been,” Nicklas said. “And the Kashdar dalsis have those souls now?”

She straightened her slim back, all authority. “Well, they used to,” she said. “They kept them safe like you would, if you had a human soul in your hand.”

“That’s very nice of them,” Nicklas ventured, though he was not entirely sure that was the right response.

“ _I_ think so,” she said. “Trees are nice enough, if you can’t be underwater, and having a soul always makes you stronger.” She looked wistfully at Nicklas with her pupilless eyes. “Or so I’ve heard.”

“Uh, yes,” Nicklas said. I’ve always enjoyed it, he thought inanely. This was not a track he would be able to tread long.

“And then a little soul-stealer comes down out of who knows where,” she snapped, “like she owns the place, and spirits them all away. Well! Of course they are in a state. I would be, if I had a nice soul and someone took it from me.”

“I’m sure no one would dare to do that,” Nicklas assured her, more than a little disturbed.

“I should hope not,” she said, fairly preening. She was drying out, the sheen of her skin going dull and lifeless, and he was not surprised when she pushed herself forward and slipped back into the water.

“And that is why I did not stop them when they went through with her all bundled up in their branches,” she finished, laying her elbows on the edge of the pool again.

“Thank you for your story,” Nicklas said graciously.

“You seem to have liked it,” she said; Nicklas could not very well deny it, so he nodded. She dunked her head under, then came back up with a smile. “What would you like to give me for it?” she asked.

Nicklas crouched down on his heels and thought fast.

“What would you have from me?” he replied. She made a great show of thinking, drumming her fingers on the back of her arm and chewing her lip.

“I would have a strand of your hair, freely given,” she said. Nicklas did his best to look like he was considering it.

“All of my hair is spoken for,” he told her regretfully. She blinked her opalescent eyes, shining like pearls under her eyelids. She tapped her chin with one slender finger.

“I would have a tear from your eye, freely given,” she said.

“All of my tears are spoken for,” Nicklas told her. The mermaid looked slightly cross, and then she turned her beautiful face up and parted her pale, pale mouth.

“I would have a kiss from your lips, freely given,” she said. Nicklas sat back on his heels and tried not to laugh.

“All of my kisses are spoken for,” he told her.

She narrowed her eyes. “You had better not be lying,” she said tartly. Her tail flicked up out of the water, splashing the opposite edge of the pool.

“I had better not be,” Nicklas agreed, tucking a lock of hair behind his ear. The mermaid licked her soft white lips and glared at him.

“Well, if you are not going to give me anything I want,” she said finally, “you can fix the slat in my wall. It lets the light out, and all kinds of things wander in here uninvited.”

“How troublesome,” Nicklas said. “We’d be happy to. You didn’t leave it open for us to see, then?” he teased, standing.

“No,” she groused. “Otherwise it would have been such a waste of time, I might have died.”

“I wouldn’t want that,” Nicklas said mildly. She narrowed her eyes and sank up to her cheekbones, blowing bubbles in the water out her nose.

Nicklas was about to open his mouth to harass her more when she disappeared altogether. Ripples ringed out from where her head had been, and the door to the hut opened.

“We’re supposed to fix this,” Nicklas told Sasha as he stepped up behind Nicklas.

“Hm,” Sasha said. “I hear.”

“Then you heard about the dalsis, and the dead men?” Nicklas said. The slat was crooked but not broken, and there was a pile of seaweed beside it to use for lashings; it would be a fairly easy fix.

“Make sense seed want gava-kava, now,” Sasha said. Nicklas turned halfway around to look at him. “If she have all soul,” he added.

“She must,” Nicklas mused. “Two hundred years. Do you think they were just trees again, before she took their souls away? Is that why dalsis go after people?” Sasha put his right arm over Nicklas's shoulder; Nicklas craned his neck to look at his face.

“I’m not know why tree do things,” Sasha huffed. “Not even know why mermaid do things, although you not very nice, trick her out of story.” He grinned, and Nicklas knocked his head gently into Sasha’s jaw.

“Not my fault she kept asking for things I couldn’t give,” Nicklas said. Sasha was warm behind him, his left arm coming around Nicklas's hip.

“Spoke for?” he murmured, his lips brushing Nicklas's temple, and Nicklas nodded.

“Are we sleeping here?” he asked. He thought he could stand a bed of seaweed for one night, if Sasha was in it.

“You think she come back?” Sasha asked.

“Not with you here,” Nicklas said. “Nothing likes you, and evidently everything likes me, so between us I think we’re safe.”

 

 


	11. Kashdar

Nicklas slept, and dreamed he was swimming.

The water around him was blue, the soft blue of a robin’s egg, waiting unhatched forever. Light seeped up from the ocean floor, rising like bubbles in the gentle waves. There was no surface, though there were currents; there was no one in the stillness but him.

His cheek brushed the roughness of the stone floor. He was breathing air; he was breathing water. He was falling, or he was floating, or he was still, motionless on the heaped seaweed, sleeping beside Sasha.

The moss looked like stars from his bed on the floor: it looked like the great canopy of the sky, textured and glowing with an unfathomable energy, a beauty too strange to understand.

Sasha was quiet next to him. It could be morning, or noon, and Nicklas would never know. Sasha could sleep as late as he wanted, down here.

Well, Nicklas thought, if Sasha was sleeping his fill, then they would be here for a very long time. He rolled to his side and found his pack.

Sasha was between him and the pool, and Nicklas had to climb over him, Bible in hand, to sit cross-legged by the water. It was a glassy black, the same color and texture as it had been when he had fallen asleep. Gentle ripples danced over the surface, movement from a current Nicklas could not see.

He could hardly read in the dim light, but he did not need more than the page numbers. He could recite scripture with the best of them, though he had not preached in years. He could make a sermon if God laid the words on his tongue; any man could spread the word of God, if he let the Lord speak for him.

Any man could gather his parishioners to him and tell them the stories of the past, the promises of the future: any man could speak of the cross and the stable, if he knew the words.

They were all equal in the eyes of God, or so the Bible said, but Nicklas had seen God hand down injustice like apple seeds to His children, for men to plant and grow until they could harvest the fruits of their inequity. There were men more devout than Nicklas who would never see the fire set by the hand of God; there were men who could not ask for righteousness, who had never had the luxury of proof.

There were creatures, here, in the bowels of the earth, who did not garner the Lord’s attention even in their weakest of moments. God saw all things, but He did not pretend the indifference He was ascribed, and Nicklas had seen Him choose.

The water moved in front of him, and a pale head surfaced with all the trepidation of a child, only to her cheekbones.

“Hello,” Nicklas said, hushed, and she swam a little closer. She was white as the inside of an oyster, and her hair had a slight curl to it, waving its way across her skin where it was stuck to her forehead.

“Hello again,” she said, her mouth barely cresting the water. It was impossible to tell where she was looking, but her brow was certainly furrowed in Sasha’s direction, and her voice was nothing more than a whisper.

“He’s a heavy sleeper,” Nicklas told her, and she turned her frown on him.

“Why should I listen to you?” she asked, oddly petulant, but she drifted to the edge of the pool and stayed, her shoulders above the water now, her attention flickering between Nicklas and Sasha in equal parts.

“I’m only trying to make you feel better,” Nicklas said, and she shot Sasha one last concerned look and set her elbows on the stone.

“I am not going to feel better for a hundred years, at least,” she said on a sigh. “There will be no one to talk to, and nothing to think about, and I will float here like old coral that no one wants to live in.” She caught the thick, wet mass of her hair in her fingers and wrung it out like old linen, then laid it on the smooth rock beside her arm, a twisting white snake.

“In a hundred years I’ll be dead,” Nicklas told her, in case that was any solace. She snorted, just a puff of air in the motionless cocoon of the cove, a breeze from nowhere.

“I am angry with you,” she said simply. “I had thought you might stay, and of course you will not, and then where will I be?” She laid her head on her arms, crossed on the lip of the pool like a statue in a fountain.

“Have you met other people before? Did anyone stay?” Nicklas asked, because this was not a fruitful avenue of discussion, and he did not like the set of her lips; a tantrum from a child was all tears and no consequence, but he did not trust her past a sulk, for what she might do.

“Of course I have,” she said, not moving from the floor. She tilted her face to look at him, the skin of her nape wrinkling as she turned her neck. “I have met all sorts of people, men and ladies, people with books and things and people who are beyond fools, nothing worth anything to talk to. I can go out to the sunlight, if I want to, you know. It is not very far.”

“Can you?” Nicklas asked. “What’s out there?” His legs were beginning to ache, but he was not of a mind to move nearer to the water or to her, and Sasha was taking up all the rest of the available space. He flexed his toes and rolled his shoulders.

“People on the banks of the river, where it meets the sun,” she said, as though he was an idiot for asking. “Washing and things, and playing with their children, little things that cannot swim at all,” she shrugged, “though I have seen them try.”

She shifted, not toward him, and he watched her stretch her tail out underwater, a shimmer in the blackness.

“Do you have a name?” she said. Her colorless eyes blinked, slow and careful, and he thought for a moment before he opened his mouth.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “Do you?”

“No,” she retorted, visibly annoyed. “Why would I? There is no one here to call me it,” she added, twisting the curve of her mouth into a pout, and Nicklas bit his lip and fought a laugh.

“I’m sorry you’re so disappointed,” he said diplomatically.

“Yes,” she said. “I was so excited to hear you, when you were coming,” she added, almost wistful, and Nicklas felt his heart sit heavy in his chest.

“I _am_ leaving,” he told her, “and I’m,” but she was gone, fast as a raindrop, with nothing but darkness where she had been resting.

“Hm,” Sasha mumbled from behind him. “Nicky?”

“I’m here,” Nicklas said, still quiet, though it had been Sasha they were trying not to wake.

“What she say to you?” Sasha asked. His arm came to rest by Nicklas's hip, his body stretched out as much as the cove would allow.

“She said she was angry with me,” Nicklas said, “and that it isn’t far to get to the surface, where the river goes aboveground.”

“Why she angry?” Sasha said, sitting up. His hair was all curled to one side like a tree in the wind, like ice on the shore in winter. The light off the moss cast the silver in his eyes an unearthly bluish color; his irises looked like the sky in a storm, like the last of the Northern Lights.

“I won’t stay down here with her,” Nicklas replied, and Sasha leaned forward and kissed him, soft as a raindrop.

“We go, then,” Sasha said on a chuckle, “don’t give her time to change you mind.”

He stood, and Nicklas followed, brushing the dust of the rock from his legs. The raft was bobbing outside the door, a lonely ferry to another world, and they climbed on in solitude, the only sound the murmuring rush of the river.

The patient blue light of the cove was gone in a moment, whisked away from them like a toy from a delinquent child. The darkness consumed it in the distance, only a tiny glimmer between the cracks of the door; they had fixed the wall, and no one would see it in time to seek it out, nor would they know to look.

The darkness settled, black and heavy, but Nicklas did not feel it pressing on him quite the same; it seemed less permanent, only a cloak of the moment, only a passing cloud. They would be in the sunlight soon enough, though he could not see past the dim shine of the lantern now.

—

It was hours before they surfaced; it may have been a day.

Nicklas's body loathed him, every bone and sinew whispering its displeasure like the hiss of angry beetles, irksome sparks of pain and white numbness that found their way into his feet, his hips, his back and arms. Sasha did not seem half so bothered, and Nicklas took the ample time he had to consider the profound unfairness of his lot, that he was trapped on a seven-foot square of wood with a creature that could run a hundred miles in a night, and he was the one whose muscles could not abide it.

The sunlight, when it came, was a fire with no end, the beginning and the end of the world at once, too bright to abide. The river pushed to the surface in one great rally, a rise and fall over a stumbling quarry of rocks that suddenly gave way to a wide-mouthed valley, and the sound Sasha made as they rounded the corner was pure agony.

“Augh,” Nicklas said, burying his face in his arm.

“I’ll never see again,” Sasha said mournfully. "You have to lead me around, feed me, tell me what happen, what people say.”

“I already feed you,” Nicklas retorted. “I’m not your disciple, and anyway, if I led you around we would get lost in the woods and die inside of a week. And you’re not deaf from the sunlight, what are you talking about,” he added.

When he pulled his arm away from his face, Sasha was reclining on his hands on the raft, a picture of leisure without so much as a wrinkle between his brows. Nicklas could not be surprised: he has seen Sasha blinded with worse than sunlight, but damage would not last on him, and he could not gather the scars that Nicklas had.

Nicklas wiped the water from his eyes and looked around. It was midday, perhaps, or slightly earlier, and he could see small houses in the far distance, nothing to constitute a town but enough to make him hopeful nonetheless. “Where do you think we are?” he asked, and Sasha shrugged, a frown growing on his face as he thought.

“Could be lot of places,” he said. “If this river go Kashdar, we get to Mordta first, I think.”

That was a point, and a good one: if they were on their way to the sea through Kashdar, they would find themselves at the Mordta docks before then. It could be any time, and they would have to join the Falwell River first, on its way down from the mountains.

Sasha folded his hands under his head and lay down, apparently resigning himself to the difficult task of a nap, and Nicklas could not stop himself from watching his closing eyes, from watching the way the deep red of the rosary collected the sunlight like bees in a flower, gathering it up inside of them until they shone like garnets, like grapes, bursting with wine of prayer.

—

They arrived to Mordta at sundown, tired and stiff and smelling so distinctly of river-water that even Nicklas could have found them in a crowd. The man at the docks was not welcoming, but he let them pass with a sharp eye toward Nicklas's collar, and they were given leave to limp their way to the main road in wooden-limbed silence.

“Well,” Nicklas said as they passed under the gate, “I hope he hasn’t gone anywhere.”

Laich was chronically unmarried, frequently unkempt, and unavailable at the slightest provocation; he was prone to travel and less prone to inform his peers of his absences, though Nicklas could not blame him if he was away tonight. He had not sent word they were leaving Gordavet, much less that they would be arriving too soon for human legs or train travel.

Sasha’s hand came to rest on Nicklas's back as they walked through the twisted alleys of the residential district, a faint, unsteady pressure, chasing him like the carriage behind the horse. It was not full dark, nor were there people around: Nicklas was not in danger, and he was not angry, and Sasha was beside him. There was no need, but Sasha’s palm brushed against his shirt as if it was following purpose, not comfort.

Nicklas slowed and then stopped, five blocks from Laich’s street. Sasha’s arm fell to his side, and he looked down at Nicklas, curiosity glinting in his eyes.

“Sasha,” Nicklas began. Sasha what? Was he well, or was he asking for something Nicklas could not recall, a favor Nicklas could not remember to grant? Did he mean to be touching him at all?

“Sorry, Nicky,” Sasha said inexplicably. His tongue slipped over the dull rose of his mouth and disappeared.

“You can touch me,” Nicklas said, though that hardly seemed worth the instruction: Sasha had been touching him for years. He had laid his hands on Nicklas a thousand times without asking.

Sasha’s eyes flickered downward, landing on the cobblestones like coppers at a beggar’s feet.

“Laich don’t know,” he said, his fingertips curling inward, then relaxing, and Nicklas could have laughed.

“Laich?” he said. “No, Brooks doesn’t,” Nicklas began, but whether he would notice or not was far beside the point, the wrong side of the riverbank.

Nicklas would not shrink from Sasha for the sake of God, and he had not once turned the wolf away these past seven years. He did not know why Sasha thought he would fail him now.

“Brooks is inattentive at best,” Nicklas said after a moment, “and I am not concerned with his opinion in any case. If he’s even there,” he added, because there was a fairly good chance the only people from whom they would be risking censure would be an innkeeper and his guests.

Sasha smiled faintly, dim in the shadows, so Nicklas stepped forward and kissed him, a tilt of his jaw and a brush of his lips that sent the heat of Sasha’s breath fanning over his cheek like wind in a sail.

It was easy; it was soft. It was simple as needle and thread, the way Sasha’s hands came to Nicklas's waist, the way his mouth opened in obeisance, in clemency, in acceptance. Nicklas felt Sasha shift under his palms and wondered how long he had been blind.

Sasha kissed like a wildfire, but when he slowed, it was not flame but supplication, less heat than gratitude. Nicklas had spent seven years with his eyes fixed on God, but Sasha had never had Nicklas's reservations, and Nicklas did not like to think of what time he had spent with his gaze on other things.

It was not the direction of Sasha’s attention that troubled Nicklas, only the emptiness of his own reply; it was not the coins lost in the well, but the echo of a wish that sank heavy in his heart.

Sasha let him go with a nip to the corner of his mouth and a hand on his hip, and Nicklas turned back into the street.

—

The windows of the quiet townhouses winked at them as they walked, lonely candlelights snuffing out like fireflies over the creek bed. Brooks's house was a small two-story piece of architecture on the corner of two streets, and only its highest window was still lit, peering out over the figures below like a curious moon.

Sasha looked at Nicklas and then up.

Nicklas knocked at the door, and then again. Upstairs, someone moved, a figure between the window and the flame, and an arm reached out to catch one shutter and pull it inward.

“Brooks,” Nicklas called softly, on the hope that it was not a servant waiting to glance down and see Sasha’s eyes reflecting the candlelight, lupine and foreign.

“Eh?” the figure said, but it was only him after all, and when he looked down, he laughed.

“Hello,” Nicklas said.

“Hello, gentlemen,” Brooks replied. “Nice of you to come calling.”

“Maybe think we throw something, get you attention,” Sasha said cordially. “You glad I bring Nicky along.”

“As if you’d go anywhere without him,” Brooks retorted, and then he disappeared from the frame altogether.

Laich was a merchant of some small standing, and he lived in comfort, in the simple luxury that was allowed by stability. He was in a nightshirt and loose trousers that reminded Nicklas that they had not slept well in a week or more. He had no idea of how long he had been awake since the mermaid sent them on their way, and they had been an hour or more in the town, just walking here; it could be any time of night.

The foyer was no larger than Nicklas's room in the church at Gordavet, but it had a soft carpet underfoot. Laich had a veritable tower of a candelabra, like a specter out of a Neoclassical painting, and the light pressed shadows into his face.

“Alex,” Brooks said, “Nick. I can’t say I was expecting you.”

He led them to the library, a cramped offshoot from the main salon. Nicklas sat down and felt his spine go loose against the cushions, felt his shoulders flinch and release, felt himself blink.

“Nicky,” Sasha was saying, his hand gentle on Nicklas's knee, and Nicklas's eyes opened again like a bubble rising to the surface.

“Hm,” he said, still suspended in time, Sasha’s touch the only line reeling him upward. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“It's okay,” Sasha said. “I just tell what we doing, this past week.”

Had he? Nicklas wondered. No: Nicklas could see it in Laich’s eyes when he glanced over; there was no concern, no wonder or disgust, no hint of doubt at the rise of Nicklas's collar, no queasy recognition of sickening lakes of cold black blood, of dark vines twisting through broken stone.

Did you tell him you tried to die? Nicklas thought bitterly. It was an unwelcome noise in his mind, rising up with him from the deep, and he sat up and shook it off.

“Well, then I picked the right time to nap,” he said instead. “Brooks, I’m sorry I left you with this.”

Sasha punched Nicklas once on the thigh, hard enough to sting, and moved his hand back into his own lap.

What Brooks could tell them in return was that the forest was shattered still, no word of new growth nor breath of explanation, and the church, though poorly attended, was no less staffed with a preacher than two weeks ago.

“Don’t make sense, Nicky,” Sasha said. “Not unless they come up together, or one by one.”

Nicklas could not decide which was worse: the five seeds in concert, howling their voices into the pews, or an endless parade of devils, one after the other, rising as the last one fell.

“You’re sure it’s the seed of Memnon?” Laich asked mildly. He had not been there, in France: no one who had been there had lived, short of the two of them.

“Yes,” Sasha said with feeling, as Nicklas said, “It had its hands on us both, this time.”

“I guess you know them by now,” Brooks ceded. “Your track record’s not bad, though.”

Sasha opened his mouth and then let it close.

“If we find another,” Nicklas began, but that was wrong. He shook his head. “When we find another, it will do its damnedest to kill one of us, if not both,” he said, and Brooks's eyebrows rose.

“Alex could live through the Flood,” he said skeptically, “and God would stop the rain to get you dry, Nicklas. Don’t be so pessimistic.”

No, Nicklas thought, Sasha had not told him anything.

“I suppose we’ll find out tomorrow,” he said, standing.

—

Laich’s townhouse was two stories, with a bedroom and a study on the second and the dining room, salon, library, and kitchen on the first floor. There were servants’ quarters upstairs, but there was no fireplace and the furniture was haphazard at best: Brooks did not keep a butler, and the bed was piled with linens, books, and the varied debris of commerce.

“It’s fine,” Nicklas said. “I fell asleep in a chair, Brooks. I think I can manage on the floor for a night.”

Brooks made some noises of dissent, but Nicklas was too tired to be anything but convincing, and Sasha was capable of making a cocoon out of the least pleasant of bedding. Brooks gave up when he had constructed a mattress by the fireplace and started building an entirely unnecessary fire, and bid them goodnight.

“Thank you for this,” Nicklas told Laich, because they were going to church in the morning, and there was not much time left to be saying the things he meant.

Sasha pulled off his boots and his shirt and set them by their packs with uncharacteristic neatness. The fire was bright enough to light the room and the gardens outside, washing over the branches of the trees and the hedge that lined the wall behind Laich’s house.

Nicklas knelt and traded his own shirt and shoes for his Bible. He settled himself on the far side of the bed from the hearth, closed his eyes, and tried to think of what he could pray for.

_Forgive me this day my trespasses_ , he prayed, though God would not.

_Give my soul unto you, as I give my sins to you, and wash me of these errors. Let the water of forgiveness spill from the earth and the sky_ , he prayed, beyond hope, adrift between faith and frustration, between question and answer.

_Let the worthy receive praise_ , he prayed, _and the damned receive their due._

God was listening, because He always listened. His ears were open to the pure and the black of heart in every moment, in every breath of toil and hope. The worthy and the damned could speak, and He would hear them both; He would hear them both, but His heart was stirred by only the one of them, and there was no telling, now, which was which.

Nicklas opened his eyes and laid the Bible on the smooth wood by his pillow, a keystone, a barrier. It would keep him safe, if God could be moved. If He was listening.

Sasha was facing away from him, his back dark gold in the firelight. The slope of his hip was sweeter than valleys; the arch of his jaw where it rested on his hand was grander than the mountains, perfect in repose, beautiful like a statue, beautiful like the sunrise.

Beautiful, Nicklas thought, leaning forward to run his palm down the broad, hot sweep of Sasha’s back, was the only word in the world.

Sasha’s body stilled under Nicklas's hand. Nicklas let his fingers wander to his hip, back to his ribs and down his right arm, down to Sasha’s own hand, to muscle and bone and long, long claws.

When Sasha rolled to his back, his eyes were living pendants gleaming in the night. The rosary was curled at his throat like a sleeping animal.

“Sasha,” Nicklas said. This was not the place he would expect to find the wolf, safe in the warm confines of a city, a sitting-room. “Are you all right?” Sasha nodded.

“I’m just thinking,” he said, shrugging, a shift of muscle in the blankets, like a rock against the waves.

“What on earth are you thinking about?” Nicklas asked, lifting Sasha’s hand in his. The claws were beautiful in their own right, glinting silver like rings at his fingertips.

“About seed,” Sasha said. He sat up on his elbows, his eyes level with Nicklas's collarbone. “Thinking about what you say, that we die, or you die,” he added, because that was the truth of it: if one of them was going to fall, it would not be Sasha.

Nicklas watched Sasha’s hand come to rest on his forearm, the points of his claws rasping over Nicklas's skin like quill-tips.

“I don’t think God let you die,” Sasha said, his eyes on his hand, on the fine red lines he was drawing on Nicklas's skin. “I don’t think He can.”

“He can do whatever He wants,” Nicklas said. He smiled sharply. “And I don’t think we can count on my safety from that, Sasha.”

Sasha licked his lips; the white of his teeth was stark against the muted pink of his mouth, the tip of his canine too long to be human. “Not too late to say you sorry,” he said. His hand was motionless again.

“Well, I think I have to mean it,” Nicklas said, more flippant than he might have intended. Sasha’s face tilted up, eyes bright with shock. “I’m not sorry for you,” Nicklas told him. “I’m not getting any sorrier.”

Sasha’s claws let his arm go and he sat up, face-to-face with Nicklas. Nicklas ran his thumb down the jut of Sasha’s collarbone until it landed in the hollow of his throat, until his palm fell over Sasha’s heart.

“I don’t know,” Sasha said, “maybe you think different, you think more. I don’t know, Nicky.”

“Honestly?” Nicklas replied. “Pay more attention, then, you’re embarrassing yourself.” He pulled his hand back and flicked Sasha on the bend of his collarbone with a very satisfying thunk.

The startled snarl from Sasha’s mouth was nothing a man could make, and Nicklas let himself be tipped backward with a laugh.

Sasha’s mouth was insistent, pursuing Nicklas like a hound at a deer, chasing his lips until Nicklas was all beneath him, covered, blanketed in the expanse of him. His claws were in Nicklas's hair, pinpricks on his scalp. Nicklas opened his mouth and shivered and stayed as still as he could.

“Nicky,” Sasha groaned, letting up enough for Nicklas to kiss his jaw, his neck. His fingers flexed and Nicklas felt it, and not well.

“Sorry,” Sasha said breathlessly, “sorry, sorry.” He disentangled his fingers, folded his claws into his palm and ran his knuckle up Nicklas's chin.

“It’s all right,” Nicklas said. Sasha’s hips, his back, the wings of his shoulderblades were tense under Nicklas's hands, and Nicklas wanted more than Sasha poised above him like the prow of a ship.

Sasha drew his folded finger down Nicklas's chest, a lazy circle around his nipple, and Nicklas shifted his thighs wider and followed Sasha with his own hand.

It was a chase: it was a game. Sasha’s lips parted as Nicklas tracked him, running his hand over everything Sasha touched, smoke after fire. He left Nicklas to linger over his own hip for an eternity, tracing inward and out like torture, like warm wax. Nicklas was panting by the time Sasha guided him back to his mouth, pressing down on Nicklas's lower lip until his jaw fell open.

“Nicky, fuck,” Sasha whispered, so Nicklas followed him, dragged the tip of his tongue over the rough whorls of his own fingertip.

Sasha’s fingers clenched into a fist, a quick twist, and then his tongue was in Nicklas's mouth again, pushing his hand out of the way. His right hand landed on Nicklas's hip in an aborted caress.

Anything; Nicklas would offer him anything, if he knew what Sasha was asking for. He let Sasha have his mouth and went to work on their clothes, on pulling Sasha down against him, on the heavy brand of Sasha’s bare cock against his hip. Sasha groaned, brought his hand to Nicklas's hair and then retreated.

Nicklas pushed his hair off his face in a mirror of Sasha’s attempt. Sasha pushed himself up and stared.

Move, Nicklas thought wildly, though he did not care where: something, _please_ , he needed something of Sasha, something more than his hips between Nicklas's legs, something more than the shudder of his ribcage as he brought his knuckle back to Nicklas's side, to his belly and down, a long, scalding drag up his cock.

Oh, fuck, Nicklas was grateful; he was more than that, hell. His hand was warm from Sasha’s skin when he followed him down, and he dropped his head on the blankets and let his hips roll up, let his fingers tighten on his cock.

Sasha was leaning back, farther away. Nicklas willed him to return, willed him to keep his hand moving, his knuckle painting fire along the skin of Nicklas's thigh, his groin. Sasha’s other hand was in the blankets outside of Nicklas's right hip, claws sinking into the cloth like roots into the earth.

“Nicky, fuck,” Sasha growled. His face was beautiful in its desperation, and Nicklas was slowly losing his mind.

“Yes,” Nicklas rasped, “yes,” because Sasha could be beautiful in his surety, too, and Nicklas did not want him to want for anything he thought he could not have.

He brought his free hand to trace Sasha’s again, up his thigh and over his own belly, over and over, keeping time with Nicklas's hand on his cock, sinking him further into the impossible, twisting heat of it. He was willing to do this as long as Sasha liked, but he was halfway to breaking already.

“You want,” Sasha asked, his voice washing over Nicklas like water, like poison, and Nicklas turned his face into the wreckage of the bedding and said, “Yes, fuck, _please_.”

Anything: anything; Sasha’s knuckle burned its way up Nicklas's knee, to the crease of his thigh, to the base of his cock and then down. Nicklas's tongue went slack in his mouth. He found Sasha’s fingers with his own, slipping dry over the thin skin behind his balls, moving in tight circles where Sasha had been.

Sasha’s teeth were sharp against Nicklas's tongue when he kissed him, almost violent in his urgency, so Nicklas left his hands where they were and kissed him back.

His tongue was fucking into Nicklas's mouth with increasing purpose, the arch of his stomach hollow where it curved over Nicklas's hands on himself, and Sasha should be closer, closer and soon, because Nicklas was coming more than unspooled.

Sasha shivered when Nicklas's hands sped up, the wick burning down. He felt taut, stretched-out under his own skin; he wanted more, Sasha against him, through him and inside him, with him. He brought his hand to his mouth and licked his fingers, and Sasha made a noise like he was dying.

It felt like drowning, like all his dreams of dead men come to life and sinking, the surreal, steady pressure of his own finger. The rolling wave of his orgasm receded slightly, ebbed until he could breathe, just enough that he was making an effort.

Fuck, he was melting, not drowning: he was pooling on the blankets like iron, white-hot and sluggish, every shift of his hand sending a new wash of fire up his spine. Sasha was gone, and then he was back, slicking Nicklas's way with something, linseed ointment, perhaps, kissing wetly at his wrist, his bicep, his chest. Nicklas brought his other hand to cling to Sasha’s shoulder and fucked down onto his hand, one finger and then two, pulsing through his body like a drug.

It was nothing Nicklas had ever done before. It was nothing he had ever guessed he would do, but it was _Sasha_ , Sasha’s hand so light on his side he could barely feel it tremble, Sasha’s mouth soft on his cheek, Sasha’s breath catching short in his lungs, faster and faster, and Nicklas sank his fingers deeper and let the sensation coil inside him, slide down his nerves like electricity.

“Sasha,” he said, but his mouth was thick with it, too slow for his tongue. He was gasping, louder than he meant to; he opened his eyes to Sasha only inches away, his irises turned dark as thunder. “I’m, hell, I,” Nicklas slurred; it was too much, he was too full to think, but all he could think was _more_.

“Please,” he finished, because Sasha, Sasha was moving over him, his weight a promise, drawing Nicklas's hand away.

He was empty, and then he was too full to contain himself. Sasha was shaking, lace-fine tremors coursing down his arms where he held Nicklas's hips like he was glass. Nicklas breathed out and let him, let him in, _had_ him, watched him break apart piece by piece above Nicklas, beautiful.

Sasha sank deeper, and something inside Nicklas caught flame again. Oh, fuck.

“ _Nicky_ ,” Sasha bit out. Nicklas closed his eyes and clenched his teeth on a moan. Sasha moved, irregular, and then finally found a pace. Nicklas dropped his slick fingers to his cock again, all his languor gone.

Sasha’s mouth opened on his shoulder, the barest pressure of his teeth on Nicklas's skin, and Nicklas felt his body succumb, felt his fist go tight as Sasha pushed into him, hard, and then he was coming, crumbling in Sasha’s arms. The points of Sasha’s teeth disappeared as Sasha’s forehead landed on his chest, Sasha’s back arching, Sasha’s cock jerking hot inside him.

Nicklas breathed in, and out again, and in. Sasha’s temple came to rest on his breastbone, his head moving slowly with Nicklas's lungs.

It was quiet in the darkness. The fire was dying, and the trees were silent at the window. Sasha’s claws caught on the blankets, snaring threads as he unwound himself from Nicklas. Nicklas turned to his side and kissed him, kissed the question from his eyes, kissed the apology from his lips. Nicklas was not sorry; there was repentance and then there was this, and Nicklas could not find the guilt that had once threatened to devour him.

Faith was faith, and God had His opinions, but there was no righteousness, Nicklas thought, in the face of love.


	12. The Church, Unbroken

Nicklas slept, and dreamed of darkness. He dreamed of dim shadows, of the gray-edged blackness that lingered when a cloud fell over the face of the moon, when a candle died. He stood unmoving in the solitude of his sleep, his heartbeat a steady counter to the sound of a river.

He woke like a dead man rising, one limb at a time, until his eyelids found purchase. Sasha was awake already, sitting at the edge of the blankets with his legs crossed and his back to the window. It was night, or the very early morning, and no other animal had yet seen fit to rise from its bed.

Nicklas breathed in and cleared his throat, and Sasha turned to face him. His neck was bare: the slope of his shoulders was unbroken, nothing caught in the dusting of hair that trailed down his chest. Nicklas saw his hand move in his lap, a fist unfolding.

“If you don’t want it, you don’t have to wear it,” Nicklas offered. The rosary sat in his palm like fruit half-eaten, its thin string looped around Sasha’s thumb.

If he did not want it, he did not want to say so. Nicklas lay where he was, a foot away, while Sasha ran his fingers over the beads, five and then five again, over and over. The fire was long dead, and the sun had yet to rise.

“You want know what I pray,” Sasha said finally.

His back was to Nicklas, the arch of his left shoulder all but blocking out the window. Only a sliver of light reached Nicklas.

“Yes,” Nicklas said, because he did. Sasha ran the fingers of his other hand through the scruff of his hair, standing it up and flattening it again. Despite his opening sally, he did not seem inclined to talk.

The silence went on, as constant as the sigh of the trees outside; looking at Sasha was like looking into a deep lake. Nicklas pulled at the blanket and shook it out, less cold than exposed and liking neither very well. He wrapped himself loosely and waited as Sasha collected his thoughts.

Perhaps he did not mean to speak at all, for he let it carry on for over a minute, and then two. He shifted his hips until he was facing Nicklas, until his right knee was at Nicklas's elbow, close enough to touch if the bedding had not folded itself between them.

“Do you want to sleep?” Nicklas asked. It was early, early enough for a brief nap before setting off if that was what was in Sasha’s mind. Nicklas would not mind more rest himself.

Sasha shook his head. His hand lifted to Nicklas's cheek and swept a stray hair away, dusting it back toward his ear.

“Pray you don’t see me,” he said. “Pray you don’t know.”

Oh.

Nicklas could not reply. He had not seen him, and he had not known, not for a long time. He had been politely oblivious, uncaring in a way that he could not have even comprehended, and he found that he hated the very thought of it.

“Pray you don’t want,” Sasha went on. His fingers tucked behind Nicklas's ear, smoothing his hair into place. Nicklas could not think of it; he did not want to. He had not wanted, no, but he was making up for it now, with every feeling he could find.

“Those are still prayers for me,” Nicklas said, his voice foreign in the ghostly quiet of the room.

Sasha let his hand fall to his lap and Nicklas followed it with his own, pressing his palm to Sasha’s wrist. He could not change the past, but he could not wish to change the present.

A breeze washed over them, the trees rustling against the eaves. The moonlight was full in Nicklas's face now, casting Sasha’s eyes in silver. Sasha twisted their hands to run his thumb across the knob of Nicklas's wrist, only a whisper of a touch.

“Pray I don’t love you,” he said.

Nicklas could open his mouth, and he could speak, but there were no words for this. Sasha’s eyes were on their hands.

“When,” Nicklas began, then stopped. Sasha blinked but did not move. “Do you think you would have left, someday?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” Sasha said hoarsely. “Can’t remember what I think, when we first meet. Maybe I go home,” he continued. “Maybe see family again, maybe I don’t. It don’t matter,” he said, soft and fatigued. “God don’t listen to me.”

“I’m sorry,” Nicklas said. He was sorrier than he had ever been, sorry for himself, for God, for the thousand empty prayers that sat unanswered in his mother’s rosary.

“You not supposed to be sorry,” Sasha said, sitting back to meet Nicklas's eyes.

“I’m not supposed to have met you at all,” Nicklas snapped. “I’m supposed to have left you in that library to die, Sasha, and I don’t think even God thinks that would have been for the best.” Sasha shook his head.

“If I’m test, then you fail,” he said, and the surety of his tone was a knife on Nicklas's skin.

“No,” Nicklas said. “No.”

Sasha untangled the rosary from his hand, slipped it over his neck ,and stood. He bent to grab his pack and disappeared into the empty kitchens, and Nicklas rubbed the rest of the sleep out of his eyes and followed.

—

The sun was like water on the grass as they walked through the fields to the west of Kashdar, on the dirt road to the forest. It was long in disuse, and Sasha pushed aside a branch to let Nicklas pass. Weeds were growing through the rocks, prying their way toward the sky.

It was silent but for the birds, and even they fell still as death as Sasha approached. The forest sat shadowed in the distance, unconcerned with their trajectory.

They walked for ten minutes, maybe more, before Nicklas began to smell it: a stench like rotting earth, like maggots and decay, rolling out from the trees. It cloaked them, draped itself upon them like a cloth, smothering, hot and thick and near caustic.

It built until Nicklas thought it could not grow denser, until the breath in his mouth felt wet with putrefaction. Sasha was moving forward, inexorable despite the reek, and Nicklas swallowed bile and followed him, blinking back tears. The forest was vast, endless from north to south, the last great stretch of trees before the mountains. It was green as the sea, green as a jewel; it was an impassable verdant wall, and in its center was a black mark, a smudge like a thumbprint.

The path tapered off to the south, and Sasha turned them through the grass until they reached the edge, until their feet were in the low brambles that lined the forest.

Nicklas though he might be sick, and not just from the smell. The stand of trees was dead in the purest sense, as though the life had suddenly left them without asking, as though they had been cursed. Their slender branches entwined, leafless, with the elegant limbs of their healthy neighbors. They numbered in the hundreds, all still standing, the dry husks of their trunks slowly splitting apart, their bark peeling down toward the earth as the ground around them turned black and damp. They looked like they could not contain the stink that shrouded them; they looked like they might kill a man just to touch them.

“Don’t think they get their souls back,” Sasha said softly.

Nicklas pushed forward through the heavy stench and ran his finger over the ash-gray bark of a tall oak. It splintered under the pad of his finger, ratty as an old cloth.

 _Our Father who art in Heaven_ , all his prayers began. _Hallowed be thy name._

 _Blessed be the Father_ , Nicklas prayed, _and blessed be the martyr, and the man. Bless the wood of the earth, and the water that feeds it. Thy will be done._

God would not have this emptiness, though He might be loath to hear Nicklas beg Him to fill it. God would not like to see this pit in the glory of His landscape, carved out by monsters and burned raw by theft.

 _Bless the wood_ , Nicklas prayed, _and let it rise in Your light._

Sasha was quiet behind him. The trees creaked in the gentle wind, threatening to crumble like candle-wicks.

God would not have this, and it seemed He would not have Nicklas, either.

“Nicky?” Sasha said.

“Just a moment,” Nicklas replied.

This place was lost, forsaken and foul. No one would fell these trees for wood. Nothing could live here, soaked in the odor of death and rot. Nicklas bowed his head and closed his eyes.

 _Thy will be done_ , he prayed.

“Nicky,” Sasha said again.

God would not have this, though it might pain Him to admit. He would have what He made kept whole; He would have His works unpolluted. Nicklas had never done more than ask of Him what He desired, and he would not do more now. Faith was faith and God had His opinions, and Nicklas had spent enough time in His company to know them well.

God was of His own mind about Nicklas's soul, but some things were right, and even God could not disagree.

 _Thy will be done_ , Nicklas prayed, _because we both know You would have it so. Do Ye this, if not for me then for Your glory._

He could feel the press of rot recede: he could feel the droplets rise from his skin. His lungs cleared like a cloth run over dust, like the flick of air from a fan.

Sasha’s eyes were wide in the morning light, watching the leaves unfurl. The sun was behind him, still rising, silhouetting the wildness of his hair, breaking like a wave against the width of his body.

Some things Nicklas could not pray for, though he knew they were right.

—

The walk back to town was a parody of silence, a thousand words sitting in Nicklas's mouth, none of them said. Sasha was walking without looking where he was going, his eyes on his own hands and Nicklas's face, heavy as a necklace. Kashdar was waking by the time they reached it again, and Nicklas found them breakfast in the square, a neighborhood away from the church.

Twenty streets from the devil: twenty streets from death. He ate slowly, as though it would wait for him to digest.

“I don’t think He let you die,” Sasha said suddenly, and Nicklas looked up from his tea.

“He’ll let you die,” Nicklas retorted, “and that’s just as bad.”

Sasha was done with his breakfast. The crumbs of his bread were scattered on the table under his fingertips, under the smooth skin of his palms. He snorted, and they fled like insects.

“You think that’s true, Nicky?” Sasha said, scathing, and for a moment Nicklas mistook him.

Did he think God would let Sasha die? Of course, Nicklas thought, his brow wrinkling. Of course He would.

Would He?

Did he think God would let Sasha die, though he fell at the hands of evil? He had let Sasha fall once, Nicklas thought, and if he had lived, it was not God that wiped the cold tar from his blood.

Was it?

“Sasha,” Nicklas said, “do you remember, after the train station?”

“Some,” Sasha said. The bitterness receded from his face, washed clean by confusion.

“Do you remember the wolves?” Nicklas asked. “Do you remember the end, just before you came around?”

“Little,” Sasha said.

“Do you remember me?” Nicklas said, and Sasha’s face cleared.

“Always,” he said, “but I don’t see how that matter now.”

Sasha’s hands were on the dark wood of the table, his feet on the cobblestones of the square. He was there, his hair twisting at the ends like a child that had forgotten its manners at the dinner-table; he was alive, and Nicklas did not know how. He had risen whole from every wound, though Nicklas had never thanked God for it. He had taken each blow despite Nicklas's prayers: there was no reason to think Nicklas's words had made him whole again.

There was no reason to faith, at the heart of it.

“I don’t know if He’ll let me die,” Nicklas said. “I don’t know if He’ll save you, too.” Sasha’s mouth opened, voiceless.

“Nicky,” he said finally, an admonishment, and Nicklas stood and collected his pack.

“We may as well go,” he said. “If they’re there, they’re there, and we should find out sooner rather than later.”

It was impossible that they could defeat the seed alone, with only Sasha’s claws and Nicklas's fragile flesh. It was impossible to know if they would find them in the church at all, but there was no action that would prepare them, no reconnaissance that would be worth the time spent on spying. The seeds, once found, would fight for their lives, fight for revenge, and Nicklas had no weapon in that war but his Bible.

The seed of Memnon could not be left with the souls of two hundred men because Nicklas was afraid of dying. They could not even be made to wait because he was afraid of Sasha dying, though the thought felt like rust in Nicklas's mouth, like ash on his tongue.

“Now?” Sasha asked. He was standing, half a head taller than Nicklas as he always was, broader and stronger. He was himself; he was something other than a man.

More, Nicklas thought. He was something more.

“We may as well,” Nicklas said.

Forgive me for doubting that You would love him, he thought, and commend my soul to You as I die, if You do not.

—

The church was a dark cedar red. It was at the corner of two streets, on a plot as wide as the block.

It was an old building, but the stain had held true, and the boards were well-fitted. The doors that led inside were carved with flowers, a bright garden of stems that climbed the wood and ducked beneath the simple brass handles and hinges. Its eaves were painted a warm yellow, like the mud in a French riverbed. The grass around the base was thick with clover, a soft carpet that muffled the sound of their feet on the earth.

It was beautiful, even with the smell of violets in the air.

Nicklas set his hand on the door, as though he could feel the heartbeat of evil behind it. Sasha was half a foot from him, warm as a fire.

He reached up to brush a strand of hair from Nicklas's cheek; his claws were not yet there. Nicklas could see a flash of silver as he moved, but his fingers felt soft on Nicklas's skin.

Nicklas took a breath and felt the weight of the door against his arm, the pull of the handle to stay shut, to keep what was within closed away.

“Well,” he said, “I love you,” and he opened it.

Church was in session: the pews were filled. There were fifteen or twenty people standing in the entryway in front of Nicklas, between him and the preacher.

“Shit,” Nicklas breathed, and Sasha started pushing people out the door as Nicklas moved past them.

They were yelling; they were turning their heads from every row. There was a man at the pulpit, and when he saw Nicklas, he stopped speaking. The dark wood of the pulpit was draped in blue, and the man's fingers stroked lovingly over it as he turned.

He took a step off the dais and left one of himself behind. He took a step, and left another.

Sasha was behind Nicklas, herding people like angry goats. He was enough the wolf that they paled at his voice, at his eyes, at the strangeness of him, and they went.

“Father,” the seed said all together. There were five of them now, and Nicklas dropped his pack and touched the curve of the pews on either side of him.

“And He will deliver the lambs from slaughter,” Nicklas prayed, “and the children from illness, that they may look upon Him in the safety of His Grace.” The church was nearly cleared: the seed did not want those souls when they could have another. Nicklas knelt and found his Bible. They were taking their time, and he would use what of that he had left.

“You took something from us,” one of the seed said in its horrible tones, and then another said, “You took what was ours.”

“You took my sister, my brother,” they said; “You took him,” and Nicklas could not tell one voice from another. The church was filled with screams. It was a fountain of desolation, an endless chatter of agony pouring from their mouths.

Nicklas was halfway into the church, in the main aisle. He could feel the weight of Sasha behind him.

“Father,” the seed closest to him said, “do you think you can keep them away from us? Do you think they can hide?”

They were sifting toward him, all the same face. They were moving between each other, like spiders hatching from their eggs, stepping almost on each others’ toes. It was impossible to track them: there was no point to it.

They came to a stop in front of him, five devils in the midday sun where it struck them from the stained-glass windows.

“Our Father who art in Heaven,” Nicklas began.

“You took something from us,” the seed said, “and what can we have from you, in return?”

He felt Sasha move before the seed reached out and took the Bible from his hand like putting a hook into a fish.

“Hallowed be Thy name,” Nicklas prayed, as the world ended in front of him.

The seed nearest him had let his Bible fall almost at once, and now they were busy with Sasha. They were five of them, but they were all smaller than Sasha by a full head, and they could not touch his neck for fear of the rosary. Sasha could touch whatever he wanted.

The pews were splintering; the room was turning dark with smoke. Sasha was a force of nature, a mountain collapsing, and the seed could only catch at his skin as he passed. He put his claws into one of them and threw it against the pulpit, then his teeth into another’s arm where it dared touch him. One of them found his back and stripped his skin like bark.

“Thou bringeth to the earth thy glory,” Nicklas said. The seed were crawling over Sasha now, their teeth red with his blood. "And to the Heavens thy might."

“Father,” the seed cried in their million voices.

There was a sound like the very pits of Hell had opened, and, like a veil falling, there was darkness.

“Sasha?” Nicklas called, but there were only screams, and the wolf. There was dust on the floor as Nicklas stepped forward, and then he felt sharp fingers on his throat.

“Now, Father,” the seed sneered, “what can you give us in return?”

“Aster fumus,” Nicklas began, blinking through the blackness, and the seed sank its hand through the skin of his neck and tore the meat of his throat away.

Nicklas had never drowned, except in his dreams. He was drowning now. His lungs were wet with his own blood; he was blind in the smoke of Hell. He could feel the rush of his heartbeat in every burst of warmth that spilled over his collar.

“Sasha,” he tried, but is was only a gurgle. He could hardly hear it over the din, over the howls of the seed and the noise of Sasha, of Sasha in the darkness, dying for him.

Nicklas had been seven years old, and he had seen a miracle: the healing of a man with poison in his blood. He had seen the old priest of Gävle’s hands lay upon him, and he had watched as the man’s skin had changed from gray to brown, his eyes from white to blue. The man had walked from the church under his own power, and young Nicklas had first given a thought to God.

He could hear the seed like beetles at the stalk of a plant, biting into Sasha, cutting away at his flesh with their teeth and hands, and Nicklas sank to his knees. Blood pooled around his hands where they met the floor.

Nicklas had been nineteen years old, fresh-faced and unsure. He had seen his mother bow her head and revive a stillborn calf with a whisper, and in that moment he had given his faith to God.

 _Our Father who art in Heaven_ , Nicklas prayed. _Hallowed, exulted, King. Do Ye this for me._

He had given his thoughts, and his life, and his faith; he had given his obedience and his praises. He had given his soul to His glory and asked only for His will to be performed in return, and God had never failed him.

Nicklas was twenty-seven years old, and God could have the rest of him now, for a small price.

He had prayed every night for a thousand nights; for more. He had surrendered his soul to God a thousand thousand times, in the shelter of trees, in the pews of churches, in the dens of wild animals. He had surrendered his will, and his heart, and then he had woken every morning and taken them back, because faith in God gave a man purpose, but love of God was all-consuming.

The boards beneath his fingertips were sticky with blood and dust. The air was thick with the wet noises of death, and Nicklas closed his eyes and set his jaw and prayed with all the fury in him.

 _Cleanse Thee the sin from these walls_ , he prayed, _and the dirt from these floors, and make whole that which was broken. Make pure the stained, in Your image._

_Do this for me._

The old priest of Gävle had bent his knee and asked for life, and his prayer had been granted, for God was good in all things. His mother had raised her hands to the sky and asked for sunlight, and her prayers had been granted, for she was a gifted creature, blessed by Him for His purpose.

Nicklas would press his knees to the boards and he would fold his hands, but he was done asking.

_Wipe Thee the blackness from the earth, like the dust from the eaves, that it may never find a place to settle anew._

God knew where Nicklas was, and what he wanted, and Nicklas laid his palms flat on the floorboards and prayed with all the wrath he knew.

_Do this for me._

There was a great noise within him, like the buzzing of a thousand bees, like the crashing of a wave on the shore, thunderous in its rage, and he felt himself begin to shake.

The seed were hissing, their screams the whispered sobs of a dozen children, their shouts the cries of wounded men. Nicklas could not move, nor see, nor breathe. There was a noise within him like the hoofbeats of horses, like the rushing of a river, like the sound of a forest burning.

The seed fell silent, and Nicklas felt himself catch fire. It was not in his clothes, nor in his flesh, but there was flame nonetheless. There was a light like the stars had all come to roost in the eaves, and Nicklas was blind behind the shades of his eyelids. There was a heat like the sun had set her foot upon them.

He thought it burned his skin; he thought it might burn him all away.

The seed were gone: for a moment, for a heartbeat, everything was gone. For a single, breathtaking instant, Nicklas himself was not there, nor Sasha, nor the windows and the doors of the church. There was only light, and heat, and His Grace.

 _Do this for me_ , Nicklas prayed, _and do it right._

He was there once more. The church was there, and the air within it; the pews were there, and the books on the wall. Nicklas's Bible was there on the floor, clean as the day his mother had set it in his hands.

Sasha was there, one hand on his own thigh, his eyes wide as they found Nicklas's face. The silver in his irises caught the sunlight through the windows.

The dust was gone; the ichor and the splinters, the violet stink of the seed, the blood that had spilled from his neck. Nicklas was there, complete and new. The scars on his skin were vanished. They had never been there. God had not wiped them clean, Nicklas thought. He had simply begun again.

Sasha was standing with one hand on the back of the first pew, the rosary strung around his neck, two dozen dark red beads on a gold thread.

Nicklas breathed. The air in his lungs felt like the spray of the sea; the wood was a firmament beneath his fingertips, beneath his knees, and Sasha was there. Nicklas watched as Sasha dropped to his knees in front of him, his hands on Nicklas's shoulders. His face was just the same, his hair still in a riot, no tidier for God’s hand.

Nicklas smiled. It was time he gave up on fixing that, then, he thought, on the edge of laughing.

Sasha kissed him without at any humor at all, and Nicklas lost his breath again. Sasha’s hands were everywhere, searching, checking the planes of Nicklas's body like the seams of a ship, like he could patch him if he found a flaw. His right hand came to rest on Nicklas's chest, his fingers splayed across the muscles, the tips digging into the fresh cloth of Nicklas's shirt.

“Sasha,” Nicklas managed. Sasha lifted his head far enough to look Nicklas in the eye. His other hand was in Nicklas's hair, and Nicklas could feel the beginnings of his claws against his scalp.

“Don’t say you _fine_ ,” Sasha growled. “I hear you, and I,” he swallowed, then curled his lips in a grimace.

His teeth were white, as always, long and sharp and waiting. Thank God, Nicklas thought, and there was no more to it than that.

“It was awful,” Nicklas agreed. Sasha’s eyes closed. “I am fine, though.”

Sasha’s eyes were silver again when they opened, and when Nicklas stood, his claws caught in the threads of his shirt. Nicklas let his fingers trail over Sasha’s shoulder and down his throat.

“What are you going to pray for now?” he asked, still smiling, but Sasha did not smile back. The church was as quiet as nighttime, though the sunlight still poured through the tall windows; it was dappled in the blue and yellow of the robes He would don when He would come to earth, His colors splashed over the empty pews.

Nicklas turned his head: the cloak was gone from the pulpit. The cross was empty on the wall. Sasha rose beside him, so that Nicklas's hand lifted where it was hooked around the rosary.

“You can pray I don’t try to get myself killed,” Nicklas offered. “God would probably listen to that.”

“Nicky,” Sasha said in a voice like a tree falling, “stop.”

He looked as though he would tear the pews from the floorboards again, just to make Nicklas silent. He looked like he would go back to his knees and beg.

“I’m fine,” Nicklas said, bringing his hands to Sasha’s cheeks. “Everything is fine, Sasha. You’re all right,” he added, though he did not think that was first in Sasha’s mind.

“I have to hear you die,” Sasha replied.

“I thought you didn’t think He’d let me,” Nicklas said gently. Sasha’s face twisted under Nicklas's palm.

“Don’t matter what I think, Nicky, when I smell your blood,” he snarled. “Don’t matter what I _think_ God gonna do.”

“It matters a little,” Nicklas said, stepping closer to him, shifting until there was no space between them. The church felt like another world, like the cave by the river, like a clearing in the forest, infinitely far away and completely enclosed.

“Maybe,” Sasha whispered. “Don’t make me want to laugh.” Nicklas turned his head and laid his temple on Sasha’s collarbone. Sasha’s arms came around him, his claws pricking like thorns against the skin of his back.

It was like being held by a fire, being comforted by iron, and Nicklas slowed his breathing and let Sasha hold him.

—

Nicklas waited until Sasha’s arms loosened and relaxed to step back and brush his hair out of his eyes, and to look Sasha over himself.

“You just say I’m fine,” Sasha told him, though Nicklas had said it almost an hour ago, now.

“I’m just checking,” he said, and Sasha’s mouth finally tilted up.

His eyes were blue and his teeth were like a man’s, but his fingers were sharp on Nicklas's arms. Nicklas was acutely, abruptly exhausted; he felt like he had walked a hundred miles in the past two hours.

“Nicky?” Sasha said, ducking down to track his face. Nicklas shook his head.

There was a staircase behind the altar that wound below the floor, and all Nicklas could think was that he would lie down anywhere dark, if he could just get some sleep. He leaned against Sasha.

“Tired, is all,” he said. “Do you think He left us someplace to sleep?”

He had, either from kindness or simple adherence to the original design. The stairs led down to a small apartment, no more than two rooms and a bed. There was no hearth below-ground, only the small one to the left of the pulpit upstairs.

“Hmph,” Sasha grumbled, but he let Nicklas pull him into the bedroom anyway.

Someone would come to the church eventually, though hopefully not before tomorrow. Someone would want to know what had happened, and someone would have to give the sermon in the morning. Nicklas could not imagine what he would tell them, though he could stand before the altar if they needed him. He thought he had enough to say for a thousand sermons, after today.

Sasha sat on the edge of the bed as Nicklas pulled his boots off and unbuttoned his collar. It was dark save the persistent spill of midday sunlight coming from the staircase, and his claws shone like stars in his lap.

Nicklas pulled his shirt over his head and kicked off his trousers and lay down; Sasha could think all he wanted to while Nicklas slept.

“Come here,” Nicklas told the pillow, waving his hand in Sasha’s direction. He would never admit it to Sasha, but he was cold.

There was a _hush_ of cloth, the drop of a boot, and then Sasha’s arm came around Nicklas from behind as Nicklas blinked himself back awake. “Sh,” Sasha said in his ear, though Nicklas was fairly certain he had not said anything.

Sasha’s claws were on the bare skin of Nicklas's chest, the gentle touch of them like embers against his nerves. He turned his head until he found Sasha’s mouth, as hot as the rest of him, sweeter than fruit. Nicklas closed his eyes and let himself float between the pressure of Sasha’s hand and the gentle, flickering touch of his lips, quick bursts of sensation washing over him.

Sasha’s mouth left his and he nosed down Nicklas's jaw to his neck, still laying kisses over his throat.

“I’m fine,” Nicklas murmured, and Sasha bit him.

“I know,” Sasha said, over Nicklas's startled protest. He bit him again, more of a press than a pierce, pinching the thin skin between his teeth. It hurt, if not terribly; it hurt more than Sasha’s claws on his chest, and it hurt differently. Nicklas let it go on a moment longer, then reached up and pushed at Sasha’s forehead.

“Ow,” he said plaintively. Sasha let him go. The tips of his claws felt like a comfortable heat now, and Nicklas laid his hand over Sasha’s and let the warmth draw over him.

Nicklas slept, and dreamed of nothing.

—

The room was fully dark when he woke, no light creeping down the stairs. There were no stars in the ceiling, no dying fire, and Nicklas blinked his eyes open to perfect blackness.

Sasha was still sleeping. They had separated in the hours laying beside each other. Sasha’s hand was all that was touching Nicklas now, resting on his hip. Nicklas turned until he could find Sasha’s shoulder and then his chest with his fingertips. He kissed the coarse dusting of hair next to his fingers, and Sasha sighed.

“You awake?” Sasha asked, as though he was the one who had been waiting.

“Maybe,” Nicklas said. “We need to get a light down here.” The bed dipped as Sasha moved, his body slipping away from Nicklas's hand.

“There’s candle on table,” he said smugly. “You just can’t see.”

“Fine,” Nicklas said tartly, leaning back and stretching his arms over his head. “I’m blaming you when I fall off the bed,” he began, and then Sasha was on top of him.

His hand was on Nicklas's left wrist, his mouth on Nicklas's jaw and then his lips, smiling into his skin. He was an unstoppable force even in the daylight, and Nicklas was at a profound disadvantage in the dark. He was at profound disadvantage overall, hell: Sasha's mouth was a brand.

He was melting in the heat of Sasha above him, around him. He opened his mouth and kissed Sasha back, clinging to the broad scaffold of his shoulders until he heard him growl.

“What you want, Nicky,” Sasha said, and he was breathing hard. Nicklas was burning beneath his skin, suddenly restless with it, hard and wanting.

“You,” he groaned. “Come down here.”

The was nothing but Sasha, who was everywhere, shit, everywhere and driving Nicklas insane. There was nothing but Sasha’s hands gripping the back of his head, digging into the outside of his thigh, Sasha’s voice panting and biting out whimpers in the darkness.

Nothing but Sasha, invisible and coming apart, and Nicklas felt the thought go through him like a shock.

He spread his legs and hooked his thigh over Sasha’s and pulled him down, heavy and solid against him, solid and perfect, _fuck_.

“Oh,” Sasha snarled, “shit, Nicky,” his hips grinding down, his cock pressed hard against Nicklas's belly. There was only darkness, and skin, and Nicklas was so close to gone.

Everything was Sasha, narrowing down to the white-hot shift of his thigh against Nicklas's cock, the shuddering rush of his breath in Nicklas's ear, the desperation in his body like that slid like fire through Nicklas's veins.

“Sasha,” he begged, as if Sasha was not giving him everything he could ask for, as if Sasha would save him from this, not make it worse. “Sasha, fuck, _will you_ ,” and Sasha pulled Nicklas's head back and kissed him like he was dying.

Nicklas came in scalding, endless waves, fuck, his mouth open and his mind blank, drowning in it. He felt Sasha break over him, wrapped around Nicklas, his face in Nicklas's neck and his back shaking as his cock jerked between them.

It was like dying, Nicklas thought, only with someone there to hold him in place.

Nicklas was still drifting in the darkness when Sasha pushed off of him and then off the bed, and Nicklas was fumbling with the blankets when he heard the scratch of flint and then the whisper of a wick catching.

Sasha was smiling as though he had invented fire and not just found a candle. Nicklas rolled his eyes and went to find his clothing.

He could button his collar in the dark, but he would admit it was much easier in the candlelight. His throat was sore where Sasha had bitten him, and the skin felt swollen as he smoothed the linen over it.

“Thanks for this, by the way,” he said, unable to quell the warmth in his voice. “It’s very feral of you.”

Sasha twisted to look at him from where he was putting his boots on, and then he walked to the edge of the bed and leaned down and kissed directly over the bruise, his lips half on cloth and half on skin.

He paused and looked up from the corners of his eyes, glittering like sapphires in a mineshaft, sweet and sly and too much for Nicklas, too clever, to have figured this out so long ago.

“You welcome,” he said, his smirk beginning to show. “I going to make fire,” he added, and then he was tromping up the stairs, leaving Nicklas with the candle.

—

The hearth was set to the far left of the pulpit, in a recess in the wall. It was an odd place for a sitting area, but there was nowhere else really better for it, and Nicklas supposed that the architects must have given up and put it where it fit. There were two relatively comfortably outfitted chairs in front of the grate, and a blanket on the floor where Sasha had stolen it from the bed, because he was a predictable and ridiculous creature.

Nicklas's Bible was on the floor in the aisle between the pews, and he detoured to pick it up on his way to the hearth.

It was too warm for a fire. Nicklas sat and crossed his ankles and stretched his legs out in front of him while Sasha made himself a nest of the blanket, close enough to bump against Nicklas's feet. Nicklas reached out and ran his palm over Sasha’s back.

“Do you want me to read in Swedish, or English?” Nicklas asked him, and Sasha shrugged under his hand.

“Don’t care,” he said, so Nicklas closed the Bible on his lap and let his eyes watch the endless dance of the fire.

“Sacred is the cross of God,” he said, “and the house where it lays its head.”

Sasha’s cheek came to rest against Nicklas's thigh. He would dwarf Nicklas if he stood, more than a man. The muscles in his back were softening in the heat that washed over them.

“The stable is in the church, and He is in the stable. Blessed be the wood of this place, for it shelters God.”

Sasha’s breath was slow under Nicklas's hand, as even as the ocean, as steady as the sunrise.

“Blessed be the Father, and blessed be the martyr, and the man,” Nicklas said, “and the wolf.”

 


End file.
